


What We Make

by MarieTurtle



Category: Black Sails, Terminator - All Media Types
Genre: AU: Kyle Lives, All The Tropes, Billy Bones and William Hadrell are the same person, Don't @ Me, F/M, Smut, Terminator: Dark Fate timeline, Violence, ashebones, black sails au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:07:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26015482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarieTurtle/pseuds/MarieTurtle
Summary: Staff Sergeant William Hadrell wants one thing in this miserable life: to die for the cause. When he's mortally wounded in battle, he seizes on the chance to undergo the augmentations and go out with a bang. What he never expected was Dr. Abigail Ashe, a woman who makes him think there might be more to life than dying.Abigail has never hated her role in making augments more than when she's faced with Billy. Sending him to certain death on the battlefield is almost more than she can bear.When their base falls under attack, Billy sends them both hurtling through time in a last ditch effort to save her. Together they grapple with survivor's guilt and the uncertainty of a certain future in 1998, along with a way to stay in the fight when a small family of soldiers tracks them down.
Relationships: Abigail Ashe/Billy Bones, Sarah Connor/Kyle Reese
Comments: 36
Kudos: 14
Collections: Fandom Giftbox 2020





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hiddencait](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiddencait/gifts).



> Look, they cast Tom Hopper to be a crew chief (the air wing equivalent of a boatswain), didn't give him sleeves, and literally named him William, what else was I supposed to do?
> 
> My gift for Hiddencait for the Fandom Giftbox exchange!

_Los Angeles, 2043_

It was the screaming you never got used to. No amount of training, no number of battles fought, you never numbed to the screams and death rattles of humans.

It also didn't matter how loud the fight was. All the bombs, the aircraft, the weapons fire, none of it could drown out the screaming. Maybe it was some base, animal instinct humans never evolved past. Millions of years of ancestors learning the importance of those screams.

Run away. Hide. _You can't win this_. That was without even mentioning the smell.

In the days when humanity's greatest threats were wolves, lions, volcanoes, and hurricanes, that instinct kept the species alive. In 2043, it was an obstacle to overcome. It was a weakness the machines exploited.

William "Billy" Hadrell didn't usually slow down long enough to ponder the big question at the root of this war. When he did, his thoughts turned so bleak he could stare at the metal walls of his barracks for hours, unmoving, trapped by existential horror. Which supercomputer was better: the machines or the human brain? Which could adapt faster?

At the moment, the machines were winning that race.

He ducked as debris rained down over the meager cover he'd found, the remains of some bombed out building. A relic of the past when humans built their lives on the surface with reckless abandon. Now it was Heaven and Hell, a place to hide for a moment while he and his crew got their bearings. In another moment, the machines might make it their tomb.

A lifetime of battle let him gauge the situation with savage efficiency. Three died within seconds of disembarking the Dragonfly. Two more as they ran for this shelter. If they didn't accomplish their mission, that was five human lives wasted.

He'd see this thing done or die trying.

Leading Dani Ramos and her geek squad inside this Legion facility was, most likely, a death sentence for all of them. That's why she insisted on doing the job herself. He wished Harper was still here. She'd been a great soldier before she got her augments. After, though, she put them all to shame. Harper could be counted on to get this done.

Today's mission could end the war. A few lines of code typed into the right terminal could unleash the mother of all Trojan horses right into the heart of the beast. They just needed to get her inside.

In less time than it took to blink, he peaked around his cover and got the lay of the land. Amid the destruction, the shiny machines with their red eyes, the human bodies, he saw their way inside.

Four augments. Three geeks with limited combat experience. One Dani. One Billy. Three other soldiers. Twelve of them. Dragonflies had flown in hundreds more bodies around the facility, little more than distractions, an effort to spread out the machines and keep them from discerning the true purpose of the attack.

"Augments," he said, skipping the time consuming process of using their names, "you stick to the commander and her geeks like glue, do you understand? Don't waste your energy helping the rest of us."

Everyone nodded. They all knew the score.

"Right." He tightened his grip of the plasma rifle he'd acquired two weeks earlier. He braced his feet in the rubble and took a deep breath. This could very well be the end for him. He was all right with that. "Follow me!"

He exploded into action, knowing his crew followed exactly as they should. An aerial hunter-killer whirred overhead, sighting them instantly. As one, the eyes and weapons of every terminator and ground-series hunter-killer turned to them.

There wasn't time to do anything but shoot and run. If they got pinned down, they'd never get back up.

More screaming. Ordnance and plasma exploded all around him, but he still pressed on, clearing a path for the others. They had to make it inside. They had to make everything worth it.

"Hadrell!" a voice behind him shouted as the body of one of their augments flew overhead.

He spared a glance over his shoulder and what he saw was enough to make him stop running and sprint back to the group.

A goddamn Rev-9 was tearing through them, splitting into twin masses of metal and razor sharp tentacles. It didn't even need a gun. You don't fight a Rev-9. You listen to that ancestral instinct to run like Hell and hope it has better things to do than chase you.

Hadrell charged right at it. In the distance, he heard a roar he dimly recognized as himself. Only one augment was still on her feet trading blows with the Rev-9, and she was losing. Rev-7's descended on all sides.

Their diversions hadn't worked. Legion had seen this coming.

Countless battles, endless training had led him to this moment. He shouted the situation into his radio and time stretched out before him.

The machine bore down on Dani and damn if she wasn't holding her ground, snarling at it, firing her 28-gauge for all she was worth.

His finger tightened on the trigger, but Dani moved, blocking his shot. God damnit, he was so close. The Rev-9 produced a long blade from one of its arms.

The rifle fell from his grasp, banging along his side and hip in his sprint. He slammed into her, sending her flying out of the machine's reach.

The blade sank into his gut and the breath knocked out of his lungs like he'd been punched. Getting stabbed didn't hurt until later, when the adrenaline died down. It was a good thing. It allowed him to maintain control of his faculties long enough to reach his hand back for the plasma rifle.

It wouldn't kill a Rev-9, but it would ruin that thing's day.

In one smooth motion, he raised the weapon and squeezed the trigger.

After that, everything went black.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Her face came to him in his dreams and dreams they must have been. He'd lost his belief in God after Judgment Day, but somehow an angel, a battlefield valkyrie, had come to escort him into the afterlife.

Dark hair, dark eyes, a little cleft in her chin and creases around those eyes from her intense focus on him. He wanted to tell her it was all right, that an angel shouldn't look so worried.

He whispered to her, because that was as loud as he could speak. His lungs were failing him. Blood gathered in his throat. He didn't want to mar his pretty angel with his blood, so he carefully formed each word.

"Let me stay. I want…augments. Still fight."

This made his angel sad. Even in the haze of death he could see that unvarnished grief. But still, she nodded and he let his body relax.

After that, his world began to darken again and his only regret was leaving the angel behind.

  
  


_Two weeks later_

  
  


Abigail checked her patient's vitals one more time. They'd been gradually backing him off the sedatives for days now, letting his body get used to all the new hardware in bits and pieces.

Augments who came off their sedatives right away tended to have one of two reactions: one, they went into shock and died, or two, they first went berserk, then their systems shut down and they died.

This process always made her sweat. Would he survive? Would all that work, all their limited resources, have been for nothing? Would his sacrifice have been for nothing?

She hated losing anyone, but him…there was something special about this one. He'd thrown himself between the commander and a Rev-9, and just might live to tell the tale. 

He'd saved Dani Ramos on a mission gone to shit.

The resistance would live to fight another day.

She shivered at the way blood had gurgled out of his mouth as he made his final request to volunteer for augmentation. His entire body had been shutting down and he'd still looked so sure of himself. She wondered what it would be like to have that kind of certainty.

As a doctor, she was confident in her abilities, but never certain. Sometimes you could do everything right and still lose the patient. It was impossible to know everything and that's what kept her from the ice cold certainty she was always making the right choice.

William Hadrell was an excellent candidate for the procedure, at least. He'd been almost unfairly healthy and physically fit in a world with so little in the way of proper nutrition. He had a laundry list of old injuries, yet not one of them had caused permanent damage.

Well, the last one sure had made up for all the others. The terrain of scars crisscrossing his flesh now featured neat, thin, symmetrical lines in a roadmap of the bones beneath the skin, bones that were now reinforced with a steel alloy. A few shattered ribs had been replaced altogether.

Hadrell's body was now almost more machine than man, but his heart was his own, as was his brain, his skin, the startling blue of his eyes. His soul still belonged to him.

The eyes she thought about too often between his numerous surgeries shifted beneath their lids. A crease formed in his brow and the fingers of his right hand slowly curled into a fist.

She held her breath, willing him to wake up and be whole.

His lips parted on a low groan.

"Easy," she said quietly and resisted the urge to take his hand. He would have been dangerously strong for her before the augmentations, now he could crush her hand as easily as a flower. There was no telling how much control he'd have when he came to.

"You're safe, you're in the headquarters medical bay."

He croaked something out and, against her better judgment, leaned closer to hear him better.

"Dani," he repeated and Abigail couldn't help but smile.

She took a cool, moist rag and lightly brushed it across his brow. 

"Dani Ramos is safe. You saved her."

His densely packed muscles relaxed and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, he opened his eyes. Then gave her a frown so serious she almost laughed.

"You," he said. At the sound of his hoarse voice, she reached for the cup of ice chips she'd brought with her. When he tried to drink it, his frown deepened.

"Sorry, big guy, just ice chips for now."

His grip dented the metal cup and his frown turned to bewilderment.

"For now," she said, "treat everything you touch or hold like it's glass. I'm Abigail, by the way, Dr. Ashe."

He looked up at her like he just remembered she was there. "Were you there when I volunteered?"

If she could forget that moment of her life, she would. It wasn't like she hadn't seen her fair share of gore, but there had been something about him that clicked differently. She hadn't wanted to honor his request. She'd wanted to dope him up and let him slip into a painless death, not subject him to a horrifying array of experimental surgeries and send him back into the battlefield.

"Yes, I was."

He took a single piece of ice between his long, blunt fingers, so gingerly the piece might have been a snowflake, and slid it between his lips, letting out a satisfied sigh at the moisture.

When the piece melted, he met her eyes. "I thought I was dreaming."

"That's not uncommon," she said. "Though we here at medical would appreciate you not mentioning it. Might make your consent to the procedure questionable to command."

He nodded and reached for another piece, wincing at the damaged cup.

"Don't worry about it, that's why we use tin here."

He nodded again and continued slowly working his way through the chips.

"And I'll be supervising your physical therapy, helping you adjust to the modifications."

"Did you operate on me?" Every time his attention returned to her, her belly did a little dance at all that focus.

Abigail pulled a stool closer to his bed and sat down. "I was one of the surgeons, yes. It usually takes about five of us to complete the procedure."

They fell into an awkward silence until he finished his chips.

"Dr. Ashe?" someone called out for her.

She took the cup back and stood. "I'll send someone with soup for you."

On cue, his stomach rumbled and he chuckled low in his throat. The sound echoed in a warm shiver down her back.

Before she left, he said, "Thank you."

Unable to reply, she gave him a tight smile and pulled the privacy sheet closed behind her.

Sending him back into the field was nothing he should be thanking her for.


	2. 2

_Eight weeks later_

The physical therapy gym looked much the same as all their facilities: barren, damp, dark, metal and stone walls, the odor of the gasoline that powered their generators.

Instead of cots and sleeping mats, cooking and cleaning stations, this room was occupied by large pieces of metal, rebar, beams, heavy duty treadmills, tools, glass objects, balls, and other items Billy assumed were to test dexterity, strength, reflexes.

He got to see her again today, his angel. These sessions weren't quite enough to distract him from the gnawing guilt over not being with his team anymore, but spending time with her came damn close.

Other augments, he observed, didn’t always stay in this training limbo for quite so long. At first, he’d been angry with himself, convinced he wasn’t getting things right. He wasn’t the smartest man alive, but he’d always taken great pride in his unassailable command of his own body. It seemed impossible that he would somehow fail at this.

He hopped on the treadmill and set an easy, 5-minute mile pace, laughing to himself over how easy that pace was for him these days, and surrendered to his wandering thoughts.

The dank bunkers they called home lit up a little brighter with her in them. He was probably biased. He had, after all, thought she was literally an angel when he first laid eyes on her. But he'd gotten to know her over the past few weeks, seen her struggling to hide it when she had a bad day. He saw the pride in her eyes when he mastered a new task. He saw her laughter. He saw her transform from Abigail to Dr. Ashe in a blink when a patient needed her.

He saw the way she'd wring her hands and chew her bottom lip when another augment was cleared for combat and knew she'd be just as worried over him. He saw her overcome that fear and show up every day to do her job.

He saw that underneath her softness, beneath that essential goodness that drove her to train with the doctors, she had a warrior's heart.

As soon as he saw her anxiety about releasing augments for combat, he understood. She wasn’t keeping him here because of a deficiency on his end. 

He wanted to tell her to knock it off. He was a soldier. He had a crew. A purpose, which didn’t involve an increasingly silly parade of exercises. Then he’d look into those big brown eyes and tell himself, “Just one more day. I’ll give her one more day.”

That some lone, niggling, rebellious corner of his mind wanted to stay there with her, too, was unacceptable, an impulse to be crushed.

Billy Hadrell was a goner and that was a tragedy. Their world didn't leave room for romance. Sure, people still fell in love, they still chased their hormones, they still started families (some less planned than others). But there was no happy ending waiting for them. Even if they took Legion down tomorrow, it would take generations to rebuild the topside. It might never get rebuilt, not really.

How would they replant forests? What were they going to do without animals? Insects to pollinate life-giving plants? Was the ocean still full of plankton and fish, or had those gone extinct, too? It was a wonder they had any oxygen left all, between the mass extinctions and unchecked carbon emissions.

Machines didn't care about oxygen or global warming or saving the fucking whales. In fact, all that stuff constituted more weapons in their arsenal to speed up humanity's extinction. Could humans save the planet after all this?

His feet hit the cycling treads with rhythmic precision. He could maintain this pace for hours before his system began to overheat. Any faster, and he'd have only minutes. The downside of the augmentations. The geeks and doc's were all busy working on ways around the human body's limitations, but for now, an augment could only exert extreme effort for about half an hour, give or take.

From Abigail, his thoughts drifted back to his last conversation with Derek Reese. Dani's big plan had failed and it seemed apparent the machines had known they were coming. How had they known? They hadn't been hacked. The entire assault plan had occurred verbally, in a briefing room swept hourly for surveillance. K-9 units patrolled too regularly for infiltrators to last long inside their facilities.

That left one astoundingly unbelievable option: a human had tipped them off. They'd been betrayed from the inside. 

It made him want to bust heads until he found the culprit, a feat he could perform quite efficiently these days. He didn't even need to get violent. His HUD—head-up display—could read the physical stats on a person when he needed to. Or wanted to. Color him childish, but he liked the way Abigail's pulse spiked and her skin warmed every time he took his shirt off.

"How do you feel about juggling, Hadrell?" Abigail appeared in front of his treadmill with three glass orbs in her hands.

He broke into a grin and hit the emergency stop, hopping up onto the side rails until the treads stopped moving. "I did go through the required run-away-and-join-the-circus phase when I was kid."

"Good. Follow me." Her smile answered his and he couldn't stop himself from appreciating the sway of her cargo-panted hips as she led the way.

"First," she tossed an orb at him before he'd mentally prepared himself for it. He caught it easily, without shattering it, thank you very much. "Excellent."

The other two followed in quick succession. This test was easy to understand: not only did he need to demonstrate his reflexes, but also the dexterity required to snatch the objects out of the air without crushing them, and catch the third without smashing it against the other in his left hand.

"Very good. Let's see the juggling."

Despite never having actually juggled anything in his life, he fell into the pattern as seamlessly as an old pro. While tossing and catching, he asked, "Did your parents ever take you to a circus?"

"No." She scribbled notes on the pad she carried with her throughout their sessions. "My father was much too busy with his job to waste time on something as trifling as entertainment."

Bitterness tinged her words, but she kept on watching him and taking her notes.

"I never went, either," he said. "My parents talked about it, though, especially once my dad got his job here in LA."

"Yes, he was a pilot, right? He's the one who helped you get your pilot's license."

"Right before Judgment Day, yeah." This conversation was moving in a direction he'd prefer it didn't, so he caught each orb. "What's next?"

"Give those back to me. Now what I want you to do is start throwing some combinations on the bag and catch these when I start throwing them."

The "bag" wasn't a bag as much as it was an amalgamation of blown tires and other useless rubber. Augments did a real number on anything less sturdy. She took her place on the other side of the bag and nodded for him to proceed.

Punching he could do without thinking. It had been necessary for survival before Dani formed the North American resistance. His skills had atrophied somewhat in the intervening years—humans couldn't get very far boxing with terminators—but with his augments came a litany of fighting techniques programmed into his shiny new hardware.

"You were flight qualified pretty early on in the war. May I ask why you gave that up and volunteered for the ground forces?"

While he stewed over this difficult question, she tossed an orb his way. The glass splintered but didn't shatter in his hand. Catching on quickly to this new test, he set it aside and continued pounding on the bag.

"Saw too many soldiers dying after I dumped them off, nothing too deep about it."

Sweat beaded from his hairline, dripping down his neck to his shirt. His heart rate increased, even knowing she was deliberately working him up, pushing his limits.

"Dani's the same way," she said. "I can see why she chooses you for most of her missions."

While he was busy processing that compliment, she chucked another orb at him. This time, he captured it smoothly, without damage.

He opened his mouth to say something, though he didn't know what, when a dog barked in the distance.


	3. 3

_Annie, get your gun._

She didn't know where that phrase came from, except it lurked in her subconscious and others sometimes repeated it. It popped to the forefront of her mind every time she picked up a weapon, every time the dogs went crazy, every time the sound of gunfire erupted in their bunkers, reminding them that nowhere was safe.

Her hands shook as she shoved shotgun shells into her many pockets. Billy's hands didn't shake, nor did he leave her when he finished loading himself for combat. Looking out for each other was paramount, but the fight was clearly somewhere else in their underground structure and those who could fight were rushing that direction.

Not Billy, though. He waited until she was done and said, "Stay behind me until you can get somewhere safer."

She produced a shrill laugh, having just thought that nowhere was safe. They had tunnels, though, and splitting off into the maze usually meant the terminators wouldn't get everyone.

Unless the machines' mission was to wipe the base off the map. Then Abigail may as well go ahead and smack a kiss on this man, because she'd never get another chance. Instead of giving into that impulse, she trailed close at his heels.

Behind them, another explosion, close enough that Abigail felt the heat of it against her back. Machines poured in from the roof of the gym, where she'd just been running Billy through his paces. Where she'd planned to keep him under the guise of different tests as long as possible to keep him from this.

Bodies ran in chaos, desperate for safety they wouldn't find. Bits of stone burst from the stone wall over Abigail's head as she ran. Someone fell between her and Billy, and he whisked her over it with hardly a pause.

"There!" Billy pulled up short at the entrance to a small tunnel, big enough only for the smallest among them. "Get in there and run like hell."

"No." She held her ground as his gaze turned thunderous.

"You're not a fighter, get your ass in there!" He barked at her like he would wayward soldiers.

"We fight or we die." She wouldn't be moved from this. 

Every instinct she possessed said it was critical to stay with him, not for her survival, but for something else, something she couldn't name. Something bigger than her own life.

He grabbed her arm, forcefully but not violently, not crushingly, and gave her a shove toward the mouth of the tunnel. "Get in-"

He yanked her back behind himself and shot round after round into the tunnel. A nightmarish Rev-7 scrambled toward them, all tentacled limbs and bright red eyes. The rounds slowed but didn't stop it.

Running was the only option, so they kept going. Soon, they weren't running against a tide of panicked people, they were leaping over and dodging the dead. The gun fire only got louder. Gunpowder and blood turned the air acrid.

Billy paused long enough to ditch the Browning .50 caliber rifle and exchange it for a plasma rifle someone had dropped. She wondered where their body was.

The heavy steel door to the time displacement equipment still stood. The TDE marked the most heavily fortified room on base, but even it wouldn't survive the machines for long.

Help should be arriving any second. Word of what was happening had to have reached the barracks. Unless they'd hit the barracks first.

Together they lobbed rounds down the hall, Billy in one direction, Abigail in the other. She hated these big shotguns. They kicked painfully into her shoulder and were unfortunately the only weapons big enough to put a dent in a machine, yet still small enough for her to carry.

The Rev's barely slowed.

"Keep firing," Billy shouted. More rounds came from behind the machines. They weren't alone, but they were still surrounded. Abigail chose the closest machine and fired one after the other.

The TDE door swung open and Billy yanked her inside, slamming it shut behind her.

"What are you doing?" she asked. "We have no exit in here."

"We have no exit out there." Billy flipped the system on and started keying up the bubble. She didn't know he knew how to do that. She certainly didn't know how to operate one of these things.

"Billy, what-"

"I'm getting you out of here."

Something banged on the door outside, hard enough to shake it. Her heart stuttered. This was it. Those things were going to get in and she was going to die. Billy at least stood a chance.

Then it clicked.

"Wait, what? What do you mean you're getting me out of here?"

The TDE hummed to life and already the air in the chamber filled with static.

"The 90's were nice and safe, right? That's the last date someone used."

He ignored her, going through the motions of charging a time displacement bubble as smoothly as if he'd been doing it his whole life.

"Get on the pad," he said. "I'll hold them off."

"No." She shook her head, prepared to stand her ground knowing it was useless. He'd just pick her up and put her where he wanted her.

The door bent dangerously inward with another catastrophic boom. Then the banging got louder and faster. With each successive hit, the door came further apart.

She backed up, hands slipping on the weapon with her sweat, until her back hit Billy.

"Easy." One of his big hands came down on her shoulder. "Thirty seconds. C'mon."

He tugged her over to the pad and that stutter in her heart turned to full blown arrhythmia. She'd pass out if she wasn't careful. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe it would be better if she was unconscious.

"No," she repeated, shaking her head and struggling even though it was like trying to stop a tank with her bare hands. "Not without you. Either we both go or we both stay."

"Twenty seconds. It's not up for discussion." He had to shout to be heard over the TDE and the killers outside.

The door blew off and a strange sense of calm washed over Abigail. The noise sounded far away and Billy appeared to move in slow motion as he shouldered the plasma rifle and fired, running as though through water toward the Rev-7.

The bubble sparked to life around here, washing the scene out in blue. He was going to die and she was going to be hurled through time, to live. Her arrhythmia ceased as her heart broke.

He moved with a fluidity that was partially owed to his upgrades, yet somehow all him. The augments only augmented what was already there. She had seconds left to admire him and was grateful that everything seemed to be going in slow motion. It gave her more time to commit him to memory.

Then he was flying up through the air and backwards toward the pad. The instant his body hit it, time accelerated. Sound flooded back in, horrifyingly loud and unnatural. He slid until his back hit her feet.

The Rev-7 raced forward and Abigail braced herself. How ironic it would be, to die just as the bubble completed its cycle. To die on some street in LA in the 90's, a mystery the police would never solve.

She closed her eyes and crouched over him, like she could do anything at all to protect him from what was coming.

Death didn't come. Her stomach tightened and flipped, knotting around itself while her skin felt like it caught fire. 

Oh God, she hadn't known it would feel like this.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Consciousness returned with a bang. Billy sprang to his feet and blinked, taking in the scene and the discordant information his brain and HUD were telling him.

There was no Rev-7 coming for them. They weren't in the TDE. They weren't alone and his hands were empty. His HUD blinked a warning: he was overheating. He needed meds.

He knew without looking that Abigail was at his feet in a heap. Her body took the time displacement harder than his.

Before he could help her, he needed to get her out of here. Here being surrounded by a mix of angry and bewildered leather-clad men and women. Motorcycles and lots of them. Downed bikes surrounded them in a near perfect circle where the bubble had dropped them.

Already people were pointing and shouting at them, the weird naked couple who appeared to have done some damage to their party.

His hearing hadn't caught up to the rest of his body. Their voices were muffled, but their anger was universal. One took a swing at Billy's jaw. Billy barely felt it, while the man howled in pain, clutching at his fist.

It only took a few good swings, tempered so as not to kill anyone, before the crowd cleared a path. Billy scooped Abigail off the asphalt and ran.

Running was a risk given how quickly his system was shutting down. Walking casually through a city while nude wasn't an option, either. They needed clothes and meds. 

Abigail would know what he needed.

Sweat dripped down his bare skin. He didn't have time or energy to think about their nudity beyond the immediate need to get subtle. Blend in. To not draw the attention of the police.

"Hey," a raspy voice called. Billy slowed and took in their new surroundings. The HUD showed him clear threats, except the 20th century threats weren't as clear cut as metal.

A man in rags and a knit cap pulled low held out a rough blue blanket. "Cover her up, at least."

Threat level: none. Billy reached out and took the blanket, draping it over his charge and nodding his thanks.

"There's a shelter up on Pico."

"How about a drug store?" Billy's voice sounded rusty to his own ears.

"Eh, Rite Aid, two blocks west."

"Thanks."

Abigail groaned and shifted in his arms. His heart rate continued to rise. They were running out of time.

A blanket of his own would be nice, or even some old boxer shorts, but he wouldn't complain. The blanket covering Abigail smelled like mold and cigarettes, but it concealed her from the stray prying eyes shot his way.

_Homeless_ , he remembered. They were homeless during the height of American prosperity. It would only get worse from here. Where he and Abigail came from, this is what everyone looked like.

"Billy?" Abigail's eyes opened in a wash of confusion.

"It's all right," he said, "but I need your help. Can you stand?"

He eased her to her feet when they rounded the back of the drug store. She wobbled and he held the blanket closed while she found her balance again.

"Where are we?"

"Pharmacy. Doc, I can get us in, but I'm hurting."

She blinked those luminous eyes a few times, forcing herself into focus. She would know exactly what he needed and he would get them the rest. Hopefully, he would maintain consciousness long enough to get them back out of the store.

Luckily, a miracle given the circumstances, the store's alarm panel was right inside the back door. He ripped it down and pressed his fore and middle finger into the hardware beneath the cover. A geek had gone over this process with him, but seeing all that code in his HUD still threw him through a loop. Maybe that was just the dizziness and confusion.

Once he was confident the alarm was disabled and hadn't alerted the police, he took his free arm off her shoulders.

"Can you get what we need?"

"Yes." She sounded so small, valiantly staying on her swaying feet.

Without any further prompting and with only minimal gawking at the well-stocked store, she headed for the pharmacy. Billy's current mission revolved around emptying the safe and acquiring clothes. To his disappointment, 90's drug stores offered limited options: packs of t-shirts, boxer shorts, long underwear (dusty, not fast-moving items in southern California), a few pairs of swim trunks, and old person slippers.

He took them. The shirt was tight, as were the novelty board shorts. His heels hung well over the backs of the slippers. All of it was better than nude. He shoved the cash into his pockets and a plastic sack, then unconsciousness threatened. His hands shook and darkness clouded his vision.

Abigail, his angel, appeared, leaning over him much the way she had the first time. Instead of laying there, embracing death, he reached up and brushed his fingers down his cheek.

"Angel," he said. It was nice of her to be here with him every time the darkness threatened.

"One good inhale," she said. He obeyed, sucking air in through his mouth. His angel only laughed and said, "Through your nose."

Whatever she put beneath his nostrils wasn't remotely as pleasant as the fresh air he'd just swallowed. It burned as it went down, igniting a trail directly to his lungs.

Slowly but surely, his vision cleared. His heart slowed and the sweat dried on his skin. Just like before, his angel was still there, worried and drawn as ever.

Her fingers pressed against the pulse point at his neck and her shoulders sagged.

"God, I wasn't sure that would work." She rocked from her crouch down to her bottom. "The meds are supposed to be delivered in liquid form."

"How much did you give me?" He sat up slowly and scrubbed a hand down his face. The tightness in his muscles gave way to a more natural relaxation.

"Enough to get us out of here. You feeling up to running again? I have no idea where we are."

Billy knew, roughly, at least. He'd lead plenty of patrols through the Long Beach area and the geography of coastal California wasn't particularly difficult. The mountains lay to the east, Pacific Ocean to the west, San Diego then Mexico south, central California north.

He pushed to his feet and held out his hand to her, belatedly noticing she still wore nothing but the indigent blanket.

"Here." He offered the pack of shirts and long johns to her. 

"Get changed and meet me out back. I'll get us a car. We have to get out of here."

On his way out back, he snatched a pair of water bottles off a shelf and kept his mind on getting them out of their current predicament. The meds worked their way through his system quickly, banishing the lingering effects of his crash. No amount of briefings or witnessing an augment crash firsthand had prepared him for how intense and rapid it was. Like heatstroke and a heart attack and the worst flu ever all at once crammed into minutes.

A few cars dotted the back lot, most likely employee cars or abandoned. He chose the oldest, most nondescript sedan, complete with a layer of dirt and old leaves over the windows. This car wasn't likely to be reported stolen anytime soon.

He'd learned how to hotwire a car the same time he'd learned to drive: 16 years old and facing the apocalypse. Pop open the steering column cover. Contact the ignition wire to the battery wire. Spark the starter. Rev the engine. Drive. Get out of town. Regroup.

Sitting in a car behind a fully stocked drug store in a city that was not currently under attack felt unnatural. The buildings still stood. The roads were in good condition. Human traffic went on unimpeded.

These people had no idea what was coming.

The back door to the store opened and Abigail appeared, all baggy sweats and wide eyes. It would take them a long time, if ever, before either of them adjusted to being back on the top of the food chain. They'd spent the majority of their years being hunted, ever watchful. Would they need to continue those habits now, or just relax and be for a few years? Would it cost them in the end to let themselves live as if they didn't already know Judgement Day was coming?

"What's the date?" Abigail slid into the front seat and clipped her seatbelt. She fiddled with the ties of her hooded sweatshirt. "Who are The Offspring?"

As he shifted into gear, he stole a look at the sweatshirt sporting the band's name. Born in 2007, he wasn't exactly of The Offspring generation, either, but something about her total ignorance of the group made him sad.

"Classic rock band. We might hear them on the radio." 

Easing into traffic was at once simple and frightening. You didn't exactly drive like this where they came from. There were myriad rules to follow he never learned. Blend in, they just had to blend in.

"And the date?" 

Out of his periphery, Billy watched Abigail's unabashed wonder at the world around them. There were so many lights, so many cars, so many _people_.

"April 28th, 1998." He’d seen it on a newspaper in the manager’s office after pilfering the safe.

South, they should head south. Pit stop in San Diego before figuring out a way across the border. Papers would be easier to fake in Mexico.

She remained quiet for a long time and he sensed her anxiety lessening with each passing mile down the freeway.

One minute he was studying the passing signs, fighting to keep from losing himself in the onslaught of long-forgotten memories, the next he was under attack from a flurry of slaps against his arm and shoulder.

"Don't," _slap_ , "you," _slap_ , "ever," _slap_ , "do," _slap_ , "that," _slap_ , "again!"

"Woah, hey, what's this about?"

Keeping the car steady against her attack wasn't difficult. Her heart wasn't in it and even without the augments, he was too damn big for a woman her size to really hurt him.

She sagged back against her seat and covered her face with her hands. "You tried to send me here alone."

Yes, he had. The fact that he was here was a twist of fate. That Rev had broken through the door at the exact right time, their fight had lasted precisely seven seconds, then the metal had hit him with exactly enough force in exactly the right direction to drop him into the bubble when it blinked backward in time.

"The base was falling. I was trying to keep you alive."

Street lights overhead illuminated her profile in flashes of dim orange.

"And you were going to stay there and die?"

Yes, that had been his intention. What she didn't understand yet was that they were both officially MIA, presumed dead. His entire purpose, the reason he'd been so set on being augmented, was to die taking out as many machines as he could. He'd realized a long time ago that was the best possible outcome for his future.

William Hadrell was destined to die fighting for humanity. Now he'd be 61 when J-Day arrived, too old to do a damn thing. Now he was destined to spend the next 25 years of his life living in paradise, pretending like he hadn't inadvertently abandoned the war.

When he didn't respond, she said, "Don't do that again."

He wouldn't make any promises.


	4. 4

_Marquezote, Mexico, 1998_

“Boom, you’re dead.”

John rolled his head back and groaned in that universal expression of teenage frustration. Every day he got a little taller, a little smarter, and much, much more belligerent. 

Sarah supposed it was par for the course for teenagers, but privately wondered if his training was fostering something darker in him.

Children weren’t meant to be raised as soldiers. Sarah and Kyle didn’t have a choice.

“All right,” she crossed her arms, “tell me what you did wrong.”

He toed the trip wire with his boot. “I didn’t see the wire.”

“Why?”

Another groan. Another toss of his too-long hair. “Because I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings.”

“Why?”

He exploded and kicked a rock into a low desert shrub. “Because this sucks! This place sucks! What are we even doing here? We haven’t seen a terminator in years and you’re still acting like the end of the world is coming.”

His words cut right to the core of her own doubts. Had they stopped Judgement Day after all? August 29, 1997, had come and gone as any other day. Miles was dead and Cyberdyne had folded. Was she demolishing her son’s childhood for nothing?

No, she couldn’t shake the instinct that screamed technology was progressing too fast. Cyberdyne might be dead in the water, but the great computer race was still rolling. Every year they got smaller, faster, smarter. Too smart. Even as she and John stood in the Mexican desert, wind whipping their hair and the sun beating down, the next Cyberdyne was hard at work filling the void. They just didn’t have any way to get intel from the new future.

Dismantling the world’s computer industry wasn’t exactly feasible. The only thing they could do, as she reminded John almost daily, was continue preparing for an uncertain future.

As she steeled herself to repeat this mantra, a vehicle appeared over one of the low hills between their training area and the village. Even through the windshield of the filthy white Forerunner, Kyle’s expression looked tense.

“Got a call from Abe,” Kyle said after he rolled the window down. “Get in, I’ll explain on the way back.”

They hadn’t heard from Detective Abraham Ruiz in two years. Whatever he had to say, as their contact within the LAPD, it couldn’t be good. John slid into the backseat, blessedly without further complaint. Sarah shot him a single look in the rearview mirror, so he buckled his seatbelt.

“Get this,” Kyle wheeled the SUV around, “last night, bikers at a rally in Long Beach reported a freak lightning storm, then a naked man and woman appearing in the middle of the rally.”

The hair on Sarah’s arms rose. She snuck a look back at John who had just morphed from sulky teen to wide open interest. “Metal?”

Kyle shrugged as they bounced along the dirt road. “Don’t know. The witnesses described a man who fits the bill—6’4 or 5, all muscle, moving weirdly fast, kicked the crap out of some bikers like it was nothing. The woman, though, Skynet wasn’t making female infiltrators when I left.”

“But we changed the future,” John supplied from the back.

“That we did,” Kyle murmured. “Some witnesses at a homeless camp nearby say the couple grabbed a few blankets before taking off again. Then, a Rite-Aid got robbed about half a mile away and a 1988 Plymouth disappeared from the parking lot.

“What was taken?” In her admittedly limited terminator experience, the machines didn’t have needs that required a drug store. Clothes, vehicles, guns, those were the things terminators acquired before starting their missions.

“Abe said the owners reported some clothes, cash out of the safe—ripped open, by the way—and a fuckton of drugs.”

“Drugs?” John asked.

“He said a bunch of names that don’t mean anything to me. He e-mailed a list of everything, and I left the computer downloading a video he sent.”

It is such an uncomfortable feeling to know one is a fool, Sarah thought. They had changed the future and now they had no idea what they were facing.

Terminators with prescriptions?

Back at the house, they gathered around the computer John had claimed for his own. He’d taken to the thing like a fish to water and Sarah continuously forced herself to view it as a good thing. If the future promised a war with machines, knowing how they work would be valuable.

“Ugh, seriously, Dad?” John looked up at his father askance. “You never save on the desktop. I have a videos folder for a reason.”

Kyle looked down at their son with a mix of annoyance and affection. "Would you just play the damn video?"

It was grainy and shaky, but the large man prominently featured was clearly not human. Sarah's blood ran cold. Whatever he was was faster and more agile than the T-800's she'd encountered. Those things packed a hit, but they were too heavy to move like this. It didn't move like the liquid metal beast they'd faced in '95, either.

"Pause it," she snapped harder than she intended.

In the still image, the thing had just picked up its partner, a small, dark-haired woman, and its expression was unlike anything she'd seen on a machine.

It looked human in its worry.

"Do they pass out like that when they come through?" John looked up between Kyle and Sarah.

"No," Kyle leaned over his son's shoulder, "but sometimes humans do. Making the jump can be disorienting."

"Maybe he's like Uncle Bob," John said, "Maybe future-me is reprogramming more terminators to help people."

Sarah straightened and shared a long look with Kyle. After almost fifteen years together, they could read each other without words. There were too many questions here, too many possible scenarios. They didn't know anything—were these enemies? Allies? Did they hold answers for the new future? There was only one way to find out.

"Load up," Sarah said. "We've gotta find them before they find us."

* * *

_El Centro_

Billy parked the car in the busy lot, but didn't immediately shut off the engine.

"I just thought of something," he said, his face pale. This couldn't be good. "9/11."

"9/11? The terrorist attack?" Abigail was born in 2014. Nine short years later, the apocalypse started. She spent her days studying medicine, not American history.

"Yeah. Should I stop it? I mean, I know this horrible thing is coming, shouldn't I do something?"

All right, it was apparently time for the heaviest questions.

"I could go kill Osama bin Laden before it even happens," he went on. "But what if that changes the future too much? What if I speed up Judgement Day?"

"Billy," she took his hand, "why don't we start by getting some actual clothes, first?"

His bright red Long Beach board shorts didn't look comfortable, downright glaring when paired with the fuzzy old man slippers too small for his feet, and a few curious glances from people spoke volumes about how terribly the pair of them stuck out.

"I don't know how much we can do here," she said, "so I think we should start small."

Small, as it turned out, was a relative concept.

Abigail kept an iron grip on Billy's hand. Heart pounding, eyes darting too fast, she was almost as terrified in that moment as she had been facing metal.

Intellectually, she knew she'd been inside a Wal-Mart before. She was nine years old on J-Day. Statistically speaking, her parents must have taken her to one of these several times a year before once they relocated to the Valley. The problem was how successful she'd been at burying her memories of the world that was.

Bits and pieces had stayed with her over the years. She remembered her parents. She remembered her mother's death when she was six. She remembered the move to California. She remembered her best friend, Madi. Beyond those fragments, however, her entire world consisted of the post-Judgement Day anarchy.

This, this chaos of excess, of bodies moving freely, crowding everything and everyone, threatened to overwhelm her senses. Inside the store it was worse. An ocean of buzzing fluorescent lights blinded her.

In the memories she had, she'd never seen so much, _much_. New clothes. Walls and walls of food. Every kind of soap imaginable. Furniture. Electronics. Coming from a lifetime spent fighting for the most basic human necessities, tears welled in her eyes.

Billy squeezed her hand and she took a moment to appreciate his gentle control. He'd taken to his augments seamlessly.

"Do they know?" She fought hard to keep from bursting into tears, from screaming, from snatching up every single thing she could and storing it away somewhere.

"No," Billy said. "They have no idea. Let's get what we need and get out."

She grabbed his hand as he started a purposeful march into the store. "Wait. What are we going to do?"

A plan would help, he was right about that. A plan to kill bin Laden was a little much for the moment.

His jaw tightened and he glanced back out toward the parking lot, tugging her along in his wake until they were along the side of the store, away from the crowds of shoppers.

"We get into Mexico, get papers, and…" his brow wrinkled, "we prepare for what's to come. See about finding Dani and some of the others in a few years, get them trained up. We keep the mission."

The same part of her that had tried to hold him back from combat shriveled against his words. He was right, of course. She didn't have to like it.

"Do you think, maybe we can spend a few weeks on the beach first?"

They never made it when her father took that job in California. He was always too busy. Her mother wanted it to be a family outing. Then he was too sad to go without her. Until last night, she thought she'd never again see a beach not littered with bones and metal and rubble and bombs.

He turned west and something lightened in his eyes. "Tell you what. I don't think the world will end if we go to Cabo for a few weeks. After that, though, I have to get back to work."

She didn't miss the way he said _I_ , not _we_.

Back inside the store, they each took a cart and split up between the clothing sections. There were too many choices. Back home, you took what you could get. Fashion was never a consideration, though function usually was, which is why she found herself piling heavy jeans, plain t-shirts, packs of underwear she hoped were her size, and functional sports bras into her cart.

Then she got to the bathing suits and froze. Memories or no, she knew she'd never purchased one of these things. Why on Earth had she suggested the beach?

"Going camping?" A young woman, a few years younger than Abigail herself, eyed her cart.

"Um, Cabo, actually." She looked at her selections and tried to view them through the eyes of this nosy shopper, but lacked the frame of reference to understand anything except she'd made a misstep.

"Oh, honey, no." Without missing a beat, the pretty Hispanic girl started scooping Abigail's fashion mistakes out of the cart.

Abigail reached out to stop her. "I actually need those. For a camping trip. Going on a few trips actually. A tour of Mexico."

That sounded right, didn't it? Tourists going on tours?

"Lose your luggage? Are you from England?" The woman snatched items off their racks, holding up some against Abigail's torso before tossing them into the cart.

She watched the swirls of bright colors and patterns and useless thin materials pile up, wondering if Billy had stolen enough cash to pay for all this.

"Yes, flew in with my, um, friend and they lost our bags. I'm from Cambridge, actually."

"That explains the old lady slippers. What's your bra size? I'm Ari, by the way."

The world definitely imploded long before Abigail had been measured for her first bra. "I'm not sure."

That gave Ari pause, then she solved the problem all on her own. "Oh, right, sizes are probably different over there. Holy shit, don't look now, but that guy is checking you out."

Abigail looked and found Billy watching them, puzzled, a baby of a smile tugging at his lips.

"That's my friend."

Ari could have caught an entire grenade in her mouth the way it popped open. "No. Way. Oh yeah, I am going to hook you up, you lucky bitch."

Interacting with Ari was a whirlwind. Gallows humor reigned the future, if a person took the time to make a joke at all. Was Ari kidding, calling her a lucky bitch? It sounded so strange, something that was both good and bad.

"Hook you up" turned out to be a good thing, indeed. 

According to Ari, Abigail now had everything she could possibly need to, quote, "get wild with that fine piece." From toiletries to a tiny red bikini Abigail thought she'd never work up the courage to wear, Ari had supplied all the trappings to fit in as a woman of 1998.

That Ari had both the time and interest in helping a complete stranger shop was yet another marvel. In the resistance, humans helped each other because it was cooperation or death. In this decade, Ari did it out of kindness, and not a small bit of personal entertainment, practically puffing up like a bird over getting to share her secrets with someone so hopeless.

Billy found her again in the cookie aisle, drooling over Oreos.

"Made a new friend?"

She shivered at his voice and pretended to inspect something in her cart so she could shove the scraps of red fabric beneath the rainbow pile.

"She was just being nice. Did you get everything?"

"Yeah, but I think the everything award goes to you."

Abigail bit her lip and grabbed the cart. "I can put this stuff back and only get the essentials. I know we only have so much money."

He stood in front of the cart, gripped the lip of it, and leaned over with a devilish grin. "I'm teasing you." He lowered his voice. "That store was between deposit days, I think. Don't worry about money right now."

Money would be a problem again sooner rather than later, as would the issue of passports and the medical license Abigail needed to avoid having to continuously rob pharmacies for Billy's meds.

The look on his face said, "trust me." She found that she did, without question of reservation.

Trust was a rare commodity in their world, a gift not given freely. She trusted him.

  
  



	5. 5

When they booked their motel room near the border, neither had thought to ask for two beds. Neither had been old enough to get a room on their own when the world fell apart.

Back home, in their now past lives, sleeping space was a precious commodity given little thought beyond safety. It wasn't uncommon for soldiers in the barracks to sleep practically on top of each other.

Now the lone bed in the small room mocked them. Abigail wouldn't have given sleeping next to him a second thought back on base, but this was private. Intimate. Unnecessary. Decadent. It looked more comfortable than any surface she'd slept on in her entire adult life and that decadence could only lead somewhere it shouldn't.

Billy dropped their bags between the bed and the wall and eyed the door to the bathroom. "You want to shower first? I'm betting there's enough hot water for at least 20 minutes nonstop."

That sounded too good to be true. A real shower, not a three-minute "combat shower"—water on, hair wet, water off, soap on body, face, hair, water on, rinse, water off. Ari supplied her with lavender-scented shampoo _and_ conditioner, moisturizing body wash _and_ special face soap, even disposable razors and shaving cream.

Utter decadence. Gooseflesh prickled her arms and she might have drooled a little.

Billy chuckled. "I saw some food places in walking distance. I'll get us some dinner. Take your time."

Showering was everything she'd ever dreamed of. Her new brush ran easily through her conditioned hair. She knicked herself only three times while shaving her legs, but the smoothness of her skin made everything worth it.

She dug through her bag, struggling to remember what Ari had suggested for individual outfits. Khaki shorts, a crew-necked tank top that read "Tommy Jeans" in bold white print against the red fabric. Shorts were foolish back home, what with the constant danger from metal and scrabbling around rubble and underground bunkers.

Here in sunny San Diego, 1998, shorts were just the thing.

Someone knocked on the door and Abigail squashed the spike of fear. Metal never knocked. Unless it was an infiltrator. Shit, what if it was an infiltrator?

"It's me, forgot my key," Billy's voice said from the other side of the door.

She peeked through the curtains and wished they'd already gotten a dog.

"The password is 'tacos.'" He grinned at her through the window. Even the top of the line Rev units couldn't replicate a truly human smile. They couldn't capture the way emotions spoke through the eyes. Right then, Billy's twinkled.

She undid the series of locks that would do little more than discourage a human robber. "Did I hear something about tacos?"

The next three days followed a similar pattern. They indulged in takeout and television—Abigail watched a single episode of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ and promptly fell in love—long showers and a dreamlike peace that came with being sucked out of Hell. Billy worked on getting them identification good enough to get them across the border without alerting the authorities.

At night, they fell asleep on opposite sides of the bed, Billy nearest the door and window, and awoke in a tangle of limbs. His augments made him even heavier than he was naturally, but she enjoyed the soothing weight of his arm around her waist, his leg looped over hers.

Every morning when they woke up, they both pretended they thought the other one was asleep so they could stay like that a little while longer. Nothing compared to the comfort of human touch, or the safety she felt in his arms. 

It wasn't just that they were no longer in 2043, it was him.

He took care of things without being asked. They were both watchful of their surroundings, but knowing how much more capable he was took the edge off. She wasn't alone.

Their fourth morning in the motel room was no different. She snuggled deeper into the crook of his neck and inhaled, breathing in the scent of his soap and him, masculine and warm. He made a sleepy noise and his arms tightened around her. Even in his sleep, he was still gentle with her.

"I should be able to get us ID's today," he said, voice rough with sleep. It marked the first time he hadn't pretended to still be asleep when she woke.

The idea of leaving their little sanctuary frightened her more than she'd care to admit. "Oh."

His fingers traced a pattern along her back. "We'll be drinking margaritas or pina coladas in no time. After that…"

After that it was back to work. He didn't have to say it. So she would take this reprieve and enjoy it for what it was. Expecting him to walk away from their war, no matter how far in the future it was, would be fruitless. Worse than fruitless, it would break her heart. It would be setting herself up for failure, attempting to deny who he was and what they both knew.

Shame licked its way into her breast. It shouldn't be so easy for her to run away from the future, to want to forget everything she knew, everyone she'd lost, and just be.

"Have I ever thanked you for what you did?" He pulled back far enough to look her in the eye. Several days of beard growth dusted his jaw. It ought to have looked unkempt and maybe on someone else it would, but not on him. It made him look like the warrior he was.

"What I did?"

He traced the line of her cheek with the calloused pad of his forefinger. "Saving my life. The augments. Getting me back into the fight."

She turned her face to the ceiling. "Like I said, it takes a team of surgeons. I really only acted as an assistant for the more experienced doctors."

"It was you, though," he said. "You listened to me. You got it done. You were with me every step of the way."

Tears burned the corners of her eyes. "I didn't want to. When the augments go wrong, it's torture for the patient. When they go right, we send you right back into Hell. Augments have an even shorter lifespan than the rest of us."

Most got less than a year after returning to combat. Command considered it a worthwhile investment when the augments could do so much good in so little time. She didn't see an investment, she saw people.

He rolled over and bracketed his arms around her head. "I'd be dead without you. We'd probably both be dead if you hadn't respected my wishes. I didn't know it was so hard for you. Thank you." He brushed his lips against her cheek, then moved to the other side. "Thank you."

His nose brushed hers and the stirrings of desire ignited into an inferno, something she'd tempered in his presence since he first came to in the hospital bed. Her stomach dropped in anticipation of what was to come.

He didn't kiss her, though. He held himself in place, so close their lips brushed with each exhale.

"If you don't want this, I won't touch you again."

She kissed him and his entire body stiffened in surprise before melting into hers and taking over the kiss. This wasn't the perfunctory exorcism of bodily needs she'd experienced in the past.

They crashed together, diving over the ledge they'd both ignored for weeks because pretending it wasn't there was so much easier.

He swept his tongue into her mouth and groaned when she responded in kind. He nipped at her lip and trailed kisses along her jaw.

"I've wanted this since I first saw you," he whispered before sucking her earlobe into his mouth. The electric zing of sensation that shot between her legs stopped her from pointing out that his guts had been hanging out of his body at that moment.

She dragged her nails up his back and over his shoulders, reveling in the play of muscles hidden beneath his t-shirt. One second, he was sucking and nibbling her neck, the next he yanked her off the bed and shoved her between his back and the wall.

A man and woman stood in the kicked-open door brandishing weapons. The way Billy held his arms out told her that he'd grabbed a gun from God-only-knew where.

Then everyone started shouting at once.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Whatever Sarah expected to find in this motel room, it wasn't a machine 30 seconds from sex. She'd have to ask Kyle later exactly what he knew about terminators, because he'd never mentioned _that_.

Without lowering her weapon, she went through everything she knew all over again: the subject wasn't human, but relished food. It was protective of the woman, who had all the hallmarks of being human. It was struggling to obtain basic fake ID's and even at its most violent, it wasn't killing people. Dogs didn't bark at it.

It did a damn fine impression of a human and she didn't like that. They'd changed the future and now it looked like Skynet was producing machines that, for all intents and purposes, passed for human. If they were lucky, this was another reprogrammed cyborg on a protection detail.

They weren't lucky all that often.

"Drop it!" she and Kyle shouted at the same time.

"You have five seconds to drop your weapons and get the fuck out of here before I kill you both," it answered, ice cold steel in its eyes.

Neither she nor Kyle considered lowering their weapons for a second.

"Not gonna happen, Tin Man," Sarah said. This wasn't right, though. A terminator would have gone on the offensive already, regardless of which side it was on. This thing was protecting that woman and hadn't made a move to eliminate the threat. They didn't negotiate. They didn't issue threats.

Kyle picked up on it, too. "What are you?"

"One last time," it said. "Drop. Your. Weapons."

Sarah sent up a prayer to a God she knew wasn't listening that John was, for once, following instructions and sitting in the truck. They either killed this thing in the first few shots or they had to run.

"Wait!" the female stepped out from behind her guard who, without looking behind him, stepped back in front of her. "Billy, let me by."

Billy? These things had names?

"No."

The woman groaned in frustration. "We're not going to get anywhere shooting each other, dammit."

She feinted left and ducked under his right arm, coming up between the guns with her hands up.

"Get behind me," it snarled and laid a hand on her shoulder, tugging enough to throw her off balance.

"No. No one is dying today. He's not a machine," she said to Sarah and Kyle in a light English accent. The machine's accent was more pronounced.

"Coulda fooled me," Kyle said, but in her periphery Sarah saw him remove his finger from the trigger, so she followed suit.

"We're with the resistance," the woman said. "My name is Dr. Abigail Ashe, this is crew chief Staff Sergeant William Hadrell. We're assigned to the headquarters command of the North American resistance."

"See? I told you they're good guys," John said from the doorway. Sarah and Kyle both closed their eyes and sighed.

They agreed to give Abigail a few moments to change out of her camisole and shorts. Hadrell—the machine, the man, whatever he was—scowled at them for a beat before following her into the bathroom.

Whatever she and Kyle might have discussed quietly went out the window in favor of listening in on their new friends.

"You guys never listen to me," John said and Sarah promptly hushed him. Kyle made a zip-it motion over his lips and pointed aggressively at the door.

At first the words were muffled, then their voices rose.

"-do that again!" Hadrell shouted.

"I had to do something!"

"Not if it means your life."

After that, they quieted down again. Maybe Hadrell was human, after all. The T-800 they'd relied on a few years ago hadn't ever gotten emotional when John went off on his own program. When Hadrell reappeared, his skin was flush with emotion.

He waited with his arms crossed and eyes narrow for Abigail to return. None of them spoke and John practically vibrated with excitement.

As soon as the bathroom door opened, Hadrell asked, "Who are you?"

Sarah wasn't keen on answering and revealing that the future leader of the resistance was sitting in the room. The only thing they knew about these people was that they had avoided violence. That didn't make them allies.

"I'm Sergeant Kyle Reese, Tech-Com, DN38416," Kyle answered.

Hadrell didn't react, but Abigail's face knitted in confusion. "Tech-Com?"

"Bullshit," Hadrell said. "Kyle Reese died in 2028. Who are you people?"

"Trippy," John said. Sarah could have cuffed him upside the back of his head. He grinned and threw up his hands. "Don't you guys get it? We changed the future."

Sarah's heart sank. "All we did was delay the inevitable."

Kyle leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Apparently not that inevitable. If I died in 2028, that means I never came here in 2027. How do you know who I am?"

The man's expression softened and he sat down on the edge of the bed. "I served under Captain Derek Reese for a few years when I first joined up. He talked about you."

Resisting the urge to take Kyle's hand was difficult. She wanted their hands together for herself and him.

"Wait, wait, wait." John got up and began pacing, the open sides of his flannel shirt flapping with each turn. "If he," he pointed to his father, "died in 2028 without coming back in time in 2027, then what does that mean? Mom, what does that mean?"

"Who is the leader of the resistance where you come from?" Sarah asked quietly, already knowing who wasn't the leader. Not anymore.

"Dani Ramos," Abigail said, her eyes tracking the way John's face went white.

"And Judgment Day?" Kyle's voice turned deadly quiet. 

"When did the bombs drop?"

"2023," Abigail said and shook her head. "But no bombs. They didn't need them to destroy us."

"And you've never heard of John Connor?" Sarah could barely force herself to voice the question.

They shook their heads.

"Great, that's just great." John shoved his hands into his pockets. Sarah reached for him, but he dodged out of the way. "No, screw you. Screw both of you. All this bullshit you've made me do and it's fucking pointless. I'm still going to die and I've never even been to school."

"John," Kyle started, but stopped. There was nothing he could say. These people had bubbled in from a future neither Sarah nor Kyle imagined. They fought so hard, denied their son so much, to usher him into a fate that no longer existed. How much longer did he have? How much more time did they have with him?

  
  


Hadrell pushed to his feet. "Listen, I don't know what's going on here, but you have me and Dr. Ashe now. Whatever's coming, you're not alone. Derek Reese was a damn good man."

Kyle had spoken of Derek often in similarly reverent tones. Somehow, this connection between them meant something, something so strong this...definitely not human but not exactly a machine, either, was willing to throw in with them.

"And what are you?" Sarah took him in. He had the height and build of a machine. He didn't move like a human. Everything else about him, though, screamed "human."

"Do you have a safe house?"

Kyle answered, "Yes."

"Look, we can kill each other, we can go our separate ways, or we can tell you everything on the way."


	6. 6

_Marquezote_

Much like he did with the T-800, John affixed himself to Hadrell's side, peppering the man with questions, gleefully sharing his knowledge of the 90's with a person born in 2007. It had disturbed her before, but now it soothed some of her ragged edges.

At least John wasn't staring at the wall or stomping around, declaring anything and everything to be pointless due to his impending death. As long as he was following Hadrell around, he was acting like a teenage boy.

"It's still weird." Kyle joined her on the rickety wooden porch of their casita with a cup of coffee. "Hard to imagine turning yourself into half a machine when you're fighting a war to stop them."

Sarah shrugged and accepted the cup he offered. "It's an arms race, Reese. You know that."

"Is that how we win, though? We turn ourselves into machines to beat the machines; hard to say if we really beat them."

"All I know is that if he keeps our son alive, I'm grateful."

Kyle squeezed her hand. "You're right. I just…"

"You have a very different perspective," Sarah finished for him. Her encounters with machines were limited. Kyle's weren't. He'd grown up in the worst of it. Of course he'd have more reservations than she would.

They watched as John struggled to keep up with Hadrell's morning exercises. The man started his day at 5 with a 20-mile run, barely sweating when he returned. After that, it was two hours of weight lifting and dexterity exercises Abigail invented for him. Their camp's meager weight equipment, the same that kept Sarah and Kyle in their best shape, wasn't remotely enough for Hadrell. No, he stayed busy lifting old car engines, steel I-beams, and bits broken off from defunct heavy equipment.

He made sure to show John correct form, explain alternative exercises and the importance of each individual muscle group. John made sure to periodically egg his new idol into displays of his modified— _augmented_ —abilities.

No, Sarah wouldn't complain about this turn of events. If death was coming for John, then Hadrell was a priceless weapon in their arsenal. That he distracted John and showed endless patience for a jabbering teenager were bonuses.

"How are you feeling?" Kyle asked.

"You mean besides finding out that our son is destined to die young? I'm great."

"Hey," he sat up straight, "we've changed the future before and we'll do it again."

"Every time we change something, it seems like things only get worse."

Hadrell and Abigail had told them about Legion, not Skynet. They talked about the Rev units, nightmare fuel that made the T-800's look like training wheels.

"Listen to me, Sarah Connor, we keep fighting. We've been two people trying to change an entire future on our own for years now. Maybe we can't stop society from making computers that turn on us, but we can lay the groundwork to fight back. Maybe John doesn't become the leader of the resistance. Maybe now his job is to get this Dani Ramos person ready. Maybe we change things enough and now there are two of them. The fact that these two are here and their future is so different from where I came from tells me the future hasn't been written yet. Not really. We're soldiers and soldiers never quit fighting."

Sarah smiled at him over her mug. "You give some pretty great speeches, Sergeant Reese."

"I learned from my brother." He smirked back at her.

The scent of food wafted out from the kitchen and Sarah debated going back inside to supervise. Abigail might have been a doctor, but growing up on rations hadn't made her much of a cook. Still, she took instruction well and seemed determined to master a new skill. Like using seasonings and throwing away food that had started to go bad.

"One of us should go check on that." Kyle chuckled. He traced his fingertips along the inside of her wrist and she didn't want either of them to get up and end this moment.

Sarah sighed and stood, but Kyle's hand tightened on her wrist and tugged her back over to his chair. He angled his head up and she obliged him with a slow kiss.

"Have you given any thought to Guatemala?" He asked when she reluctantly broke the kiss. If they didn't stop, they'd be sneaking away to the casita Abigail and Hadrell now occupied. It wasn't like they were using it right this second.

"I think John could use the change of scenery. How confident are you that Enrique's group will take us in?"

The _Negro Gato_ militia could make excellent allies and provide more training for John, as long as they could be trusted.

"I think Xavier hasn't pointed us wrong yet and you're right, John will love the beach."

Sarah gazed at the wide expanse of shrub desert in all directions. John wasn't the only one yearning to see something new.

"Then let's get packed," Sarah said. Maybe Guatemala was where it happened to John. Maybe leaving Marquezote would keep him safe. Like Kyle said, the future wasn't written yet.

  
  


* * *

  
  


_Livingston, Guatemala_

While the Connor-Reese team set up shop in _Parque Nacional Rio Dulce_ , Billy decided to live up to his first promise to Abigail: one beach vacation, coming up. _The Flamingos Hotel y Restaurante_ was right on the beach, had room service, a pool, tours, and boat excursions.

They would take the next two weeks to pretend like they didn't know the world would end soon, like they hadn't accidentally abandoned their war. If left to his own devices, he wouldn't have considered this. The only thing keeping him from collapsing under the guilt was her.

For her, he would paste on a smile. For her, he would enjoy something his loved ones, his brothers and sisters in arms, couldn't. She needed this, he understood that. He understood it better once she'd admitted how hard performing his surgery had been.

Where he found peace in his role, Abigail found only heartache and hopelessness. The woman needed a break and he would damn well give it to her.

They reserved a single room that overlooked the Gulf of Mexico's blue waters and Abigail promptly opened the windows to let the breeze blow in. Maybe they should have talked about their sleeping arrangements, but he didn't want to. They hadn't discussed it when Sarah and Kyle had shown them to the casita at their new base of operations in the jungle, either.

If there was one indulgence he craved, it was waking up with her in his arms. Being a soldier felt right. Fighting machines felt right. Rushing headlong into battle felt right. None of it felt as right as holding her, as kissing her.

They hadn't talked about that, either. It wasn't that she was avoiding him, quite the opposite, in fact, but he started second guessing himself the moment Sarah and Kyle burst in on them. He worried she'd gone along with it because she didn't want to be alone, because he offered her security, because she was scared and he was familiar. Most of all, he worried taking things further would prove to be a fatal distraction.

Captain Reese would have cuffed him on the shoulder and said, "You're in your head too much, kid. When you spend too much time up there thinkin', you're standing still. And what happens to still people?"

"They die, Sir."

Death wasn't on the table by overthinking that explosive kiss, unless you counted death by slow torture from want, death from regret. Death could be on the table if he allowed their relationship to distract him. As usual, his dour thoughts circled back to soldiers he'd lost. _They_ wouldn't have this kind of chance. _They_ would never get to live in paradise with the person of their dreams.

He didn't deserve it. She didn't deserve the consequences. The Connor-Reese clan didn't deserve the consequences. What they needed and deserved was his focus, the protection he could provide. Derek Reese had shown him the importance of their mission and those were lessons he took to heart.

Humanity needed men like him if it was to earn its future.

Kyle reminded him of Derek, almost too much. He hadn't had the heart to tell Kyle what happened to his brother, even if they came from two different versions of the future. Kyle's future Hell wasn't altogether different from his own. From the look in the other man's eyes, Billy didn't have to tell him Derek's fate.

Men like them didn't live very long.

Something about Sarah and Kyle spoke to a long repressed desire in Billy's heart. At first they'd seemed cold, a pair of soldiers to the core. After a few days of observation, Billy determined that was just a front. Those two loved each other deeply.

If John was a reliable source, Kyle had jumped through time to be with Sarah and confessed his love within 24 hours. Talk about love at first sight. But then, how different was Billy? In his death throes, he'd thought Abigail was an angel. Love, though, that was a different ballgame.

He liked Abigail. A lot. She was whip smart, dedicated, brave, kind, beautiful to the point of distraction. He didn't have enough fingers and toes to rattle off all the Abigail things he liked. If he got to choose his partner for the end of the world, he couldn't ask for someone better. That's what Sarah and Kyle had and he envied: a partnership.

That he and Abigail appeared to have sexual chemistry through the roof was a sweet, sweet bonus.

Did she want that? He didn't know. He wasn't even sure he wanted it. Oh, his dick did. Without a doubt. But his dick didn't run the show and he couldn't bring himself to think of her like some tunnel fuck, a press of warm bodies to ease the ache before going their separate ways. It was that whole talking thing that eluded the both of them. It's not like they'd grown up with examples of healthy relationships to emulate, dating to practice.

Here's what he knew: she sought him out when she didn't have to, she smiled a lot around him, laughed at his exceptionally cheesy attempts at humor, and her skin got all hot whenever he was working out or took his shirt off. 

She'd been like that before, too. He knew she liked their sleeping arrangements as much as he did and she responded with gusto when he kissed her.

He could work with actionable intelligence. Plus, attempting to puzzle out what was happening between them kept his mind off the crew he'd accidentally left behind.

That's where he and Kyle truly diverged. Kyle had walked away from the resistance to save the woman he'd never met but still loved; Billy had been trying to push her through time so he could die fighting machines.

For the first time in his life, he wondered if his death would have been pointless. He might, if he was extremely lucky, have killed a single Rev-9. Just one. What the fuck good would that have done? Legion would make more. Either way the situation turned out, he was out of the fight the moment that attack started.

The thought disturbed him, so he did what he did best and focused on something else. In this case, it was unpacking his suitcase into a worn chest of drawers while Abigail gazed out the open windows.

"I want to go down there," she said with a sigh.

"Then get that little red bikini on and let's go."

She turned an impressive shade of scarlet, so he laughed and said, "Not only did I see it before you hid it, I also saw that girl talking you into it."

"So, you saw her…"

"Holding the top up to your chest, yes. C'mon, I've seen you in less."

He meant it to be funny, but their time hopping nudity had been less than ideal. Truthfully, he hadn't had the time or concentration to even consider her nakedness that night. He'd been all mission then: escape, evade, get clothes, get safe.

There was no clear-cut mission right now. Their relationship had crossed multiple boundaries in the past week and a half. Suddenly, joking about nudity didn't seem so funny.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That was…"

"It's fine." She snatched a wad of red fabric out of her bag and scurried into the bathroom like her back end was on fire. He changed into his own suit, a much better fitting pair of board shorts, a loose Quiksilver tank top, and set out their sunscreen, sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat for Abigail, and towels.

When the bathroom door reopened, he turned. Instead of the bikini that haunted his daydreams, she was covered in a small hotel towel.

"I forgot my cover-up," she muttered and dug back into her duffel bag.

He kept his back respectfully turned when he heard the towel drop to the bed, keeping himself busy emptying his own bag. They had plenty of meds and, thanks to John's burgeoning hacking skills, Abigail had a shiny new medical license and the ability to write prescriptions should they need more.

Hopefully, they wouldn't need more. He only required the shots when he overworked himself. As long as he didn't have machines to fight or police to evade, he wouldn't overtax himself.

He silently cursed himself for even thinking it. Now he'd jinxed them.

The short, gauzy floral print dress did little to hide her figure or the bright red triangles covering her most secret bits. Eyes followed them as they made their way down to the beach and searched for a suitable place to make camp.

It made him simultaneously proud and violently overprotective to see the way men, and some women, watched her. A computer would find this information fascinating, probably compare his response to some ancient caveman instinct to protect his mate. They would use this information, exploit it to hurt humans.

A vague sense of relief took over when she spread out her towel on an empty plot of sand. That relief vanished when she turned her back and pulled the opaque dress over her head. He could have stared at that round little bottom all damn day, probably longer. Then she turned around, eyes cast anywhere but at him, and his mouth went dry.

If he didn't know any better, he'd say his damn heart stopped. She dropped cross legged onto the towel and began smearing creamy white sunblock on her arms and shoulders. It was clearly an attempt to distract from the bathing suit. Unfortunately for her, it backfired. Big time.

He stood there like a fool, entranced by her hands working the creamy white product over her smooth, pale flesh. Her arms, her chest, her stomach. Her legs.

His big plan to die fighting a Rev-9 might have gone out the window, but he definitely wasn't mad about it at this moment.

She cleared her throat. "Um, my back…I can't…"

"Right." He sprang into action, kneeling behind her on the towel, dropping everything he carried along the way.

A big damn fool.

Baseball. He remembered baseball, right? He went to a few Angels games when the family moved to Los Angeles. Three bases. A pitcher. A catcher. Batters. Outfielders. He ran through the steps of the game as he rubbed sunscreen into the skin over her back, his fingers gliding under the string holding her top together.

_Oh say can you see_

_by the star spangled night_

_What so proudly we something_

_by the something's last something_

Fuck, he didn't know the words.

Fuck, he'd used way too much. He collected the excess and smeared it haphazardly into his own arms.

"Swimming?" Her voice was a little too bright and she was a little too quick to toss her hat aside and pop to her feet. Dammit if that didn't put her ass right in his face. She blessedly marched in the direction of the water without waiting for his reply.

There was nothing he could do except follow in her wake like a man possessed.

She stopped suddenly where the waves lapped at the shore, staring at the water as though seeing it for the first time. Unsure what else to do, Billy let himself look, really look, at the scenery before them.

The sand was sand, not bits of human and animal bones washed clean by the tides. The people laughed, smiled, splashed, and dove under the waves. There were no rotted out carcasses of ships, no eerie Czech hedgehogs to block landing craft. Billy reasonably guessed the water wasn't mined.

He looked down at the water itself and nearly gasped. It was clear and clean and pleasantly warm. Where the water got deeper, fish darted here and there, flashes of silver against the sunlight.

Abigail's tiny hand fitted into his, though who reached for whom, he couldn't say. They stood together like that, hand-in-hand, for a long while. There were no words for this experience, so they didn't waste any.

Again he wondered at the events that took him here and again he thought the most traitorous thing he could imagine: he was glad he fell into that bubble.

"Don't go any deeper than your chest," Abigail said. "You're not buoyant anymore. I'm not even sure augments can swim."

"Huh? Really?"

She looked up at him with an indulgent smile. "Billy, almost your entire skeleton is coated in steel alloy. Your endodermal layer alone weighs almost 50 pounds."

"No, I mean, you don't know if augments can swim?"

She huffed a laugh. "It's not like we have swimming pools to test it. Muscular men lose buoyancy anyway, so it stands to reason you'd swim about as well as…a thing that doesn't swim very well."

"You mean," he stretched his arms out before himself, "these muscles? Or maybe," he flexed his pecs, "these? Or how about-"

"You have got to stop-"

He snatched her into his arms and marched into the water while she squealed and giggled. When the water looked shallow enough for her to stand but deep enough to drop her, he did just that. She came up sputtering and pushing her wild hair off her face.

"You…you…" She lunged for him, hampered by the water up to her ribs.

With a laugh he dodged just enough to evade her grasping hands, but still within easy reach. He kept the chase up, slowing his movements to keep her in the game, anything to keep that bright smile on her face, the laughter on her lips.

A wave caught her off guard and would have swept her away had Billy not caught her about the waist and hauled her back. The game stopped. Her heartbeat fluttered like a bird from her chest into his. He didn't need his HUD to read want written across her features. From her rapid pulse to her plush, parted lips, to the way she let her hips rock against his with the waves, he took it all in like he'd been starving for it. Maybe he had been.

Maybe, just this once, just while on their vacation, he could enjoy this. They could pick up where they left off before Sarah and Kyle kicked in their motel room door. Together, they could forget. Just for a little while.

As he leaned down, prepared to throw caution and his consuming thoughts of the crew he left behind to the wind, a dog barked from somewhere up on the beach.

They both tensed and snapped their attention to the shore. He let his HUD do the searching, cycling through each person he saw, dismissing them in rapid succession. Despite the absence of metal on the beach, he stayed tense, alert.

"C'mon." He grasped her hand and walked her up out of the water. "We're okay for now, but we should get out of here."

Her short legs struggled to keep up with his long strides. 

"Why? It was just a dog barking. I want to stay in the water. I haven't swum since I was a little girl."

Her words chipped at his resolve to secret her back inside their hotel room. Hadn't he taken her here to give her the break she so clearly needed?

They knew good and damn well that Legion could have already sent metal after them. A Rev-9 could appear anywhere, any time. Abigail could have her break, but he couldn't. He wouldn't. He wouldn't let her down.

He had one goddamn job and he'd see it done. He'd already almost failed her once, missing the telltale sounds of someone preparing to break into their room until it was too late to react.

They stopped near their towels and he released her hand. 

"All right. Just, don't go so far out you can't hear me or I can't swim out to get you."

Whatever he said, it wasn't right. Her face knitted into a scowl.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

He hummed a non-response and settled onto his towel. Sunglasses firmly in place, he stared out at the water, hoping to find some measure of peace in the seemingly endless expanse of blue.

"You're running," she said. "Why?"

Since he had no answer to the question, his only response was the tightening in his jaw. She sniffed, stepped around him, and began throwing her things in her bag.

"Where are you going?" He sat up straighter and ripped the sunglasses off.

Instead of acknowledging him, she slipped into her absolutely useless swimsuit cover, snatched up her flip flops, and took off toward the street. He ignored his own towel, shoes, and shirt and caught her in a few steps.

"I'll walk you back if you wait for me." He caught himself snarling the words out, simultaneously knowing he was being unfair to her and wanting to yell louder without understanding why. Frustration threatened to boil over into an explosion.

Her eyes slid left and right, taking in the few people close enough to have heard his outburst, close enough to enjoy the tableau he made.

"I'm sure you can catch up."

She turned on her heel and marched off without him.

  
  



	7. 7

Everything happens for a reason. That’s what her mom used to say and up until recently, Sarah believed it. Of course, she never mentioned it out loud, but in her heart, she believed that no matter how insane her life got, there was some kind of plan, no matter how convoluted.

She was the mother of humanity’s savior. She of the blessed womb. John wouldn’t have even been born if John himself hadn’t sent Kyle back in time to protect her. That kind of thing led a woman to believe in fate. A grand design. John’s very existence defied all known laws of physics.

Then 1995 happened and they found out the future changed, that they could change it. It hadn’t changed so much as to render their respective fates moot. John had still been on track to lead the resistance. Stopping Cyberdyne, as far as they were concerned, only delayed the inevitable. That’s why they continued to live the way they did. 

Humanity refused to be deterred from this course.

Now, though? Everything they’d fought so hard for had been erased by an event that hadn’t happened yet.

Had she really wasted John’s childhood preparing him to lead a war he wouldn’t live to see? No force on this earth could make her regret bringing him into the world, nor would she ever regret finding Kyle, but this? This she might live to regret.

There was no fate. No grand design. Nothing set in stone to define their futures. And that was the most terrifying idea she’d faced so far.

“What’s wrong?” Kyle hadn’t moved on his side of the bed, his breathing deep and even, no different than his sleep. Neither had she, yet he’d known she was awake.

“Nothing, I just can’t sleep.”

“I can hear all those gears running in your head. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Most of the time she loved the way they read each other. No words necessary, just more than a decade of partnership fusing their minds into a cohesive unit. Sometimes, however, she wanted her private thoughts to stay private.

When she didn’t reply, he rolled to his side, wrapped an arm around her waist, and pulled her flush against his firm body.

“We’re going to keep John safe. I promise.”

“You can’t promise that.” Even as she denied him, the tension along her spine gradually loosened and her jaw relaxed.

“Maybe not.” He nuzzled into her hair. “But I believe in us. We’ve survived everything they’ve thrown at us, every attempt to derail his future. We’ll do it again.”

Sarah rolled over in his arms so they could face each other even in the dark. “What if he’s not going to be the leader anymore, though? What if even if we save him, that fate belongs to someone else now?”

He traced a finger down her nose, across her cheek, before burying his hand in her hair. “You want to know if we should back off his training.”

She nodded.

“Right now,” he said, “there’s a young version of me and Derek growing up in LA like normal kids. My brother and I never got that chance. I don’t know, Sarah. Those kids aren’t going to know what hit them when it all pops off. I don’t want John taken off guard like that.”

“He won’t be. We made sure of that. All I’m saying is, he only has a few years left to be a kid. Judgment Day isn’t supposed to happen until 2023 now. Maybe we should let him have these few years.”

“You want to what, enroll him in school? Get him on the baseball team? Glee club?”

“No.” She gave his shoulder a playful shove. “It’s too late for all that. But would it really hurt to move into a town around here? He could make friends. We could get a boat and go fishing together. He loves throwing the ball with you and I’m sure there are some intramural teams in Livingston he could join. For fun.”

Fun. What a concept. Their family shared tiny moments of it, laughter over jokes, ribbing each other, that sort of thing. But in almost 15 years, had they really ever had fun for the sake of fun? Had they ever slowed down enough to simply be?

Kyle mulled this over while rubbing his skilled fingers over her scalp. Sleep encroached steadily on her consciousness.

As her eyes drifted closed, Kyle finally said, “How about we go catch up with those crazy kids on the beach?”

She laughed sleepily. “And interrupt their honeymoon?”

“C’mon now, we both know Hadrell’s gonna need a cattle prod to actually close the deal with her.”

“Then I guess we should go.”

“We have a duty.”

She stretched forward until their lips met and let her teeth scrape across his bottom lip. “I’m so lucky my future soldier didn’t have that problem.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Abigail did her level best to focus on her bowl of _tapado_. Here she had a stew of seafood—real seafood—soaking in spices, fresh plantains, vegetables, and coconut milk. Divine. She eschewed the rice side, rice being a post-apocalypse staple.

She wanted to enjoy it. She wanted to revel in the earthy decadence of food she might have gone the rest of her life without tasting had Billy not spirited her into the past. She wanted to enjoy the cheery music from the street, the cheery people in their colorful array of clothes. She wanted to breathe in the salty richness of the Gulf Coast air.

Instead, she stewed— _ha ha_ —over her brooding security guard. She didn't want a security guard. Billy, however, seemed intent on just that.

She’d ignored him all the way back to their room. She ignored him when she changed in the bathroom. She ignored him and his questions when she left again, determined to enjoy herself in spite of him.

It was more difficult than she'd imagined, mostly because, she realized, half the fun of this little trip was having fun with him. Maybe more than half. Maybe, judging by the way the flavorful stew tasted like ash on her tongue, having fun with him was 100 percent of the fun.

His eyes tracked everything and everyone around them. Every now and then, his head would cock ever so slightly to one side while he listened to something only he and any nearby dogs could hear. His attention was everywhere but her.

Not that she had a need to be the center of attention, but their closeness, borne of her role in his new life and culminating in that scorching kiss they'd shared, felt like an illusion today. In retrospect, perhaps it was more of a delusion. She'd poured her heart and soul into his recovery, investing little bits and pieces of herself in an unconscious man. She'd thought he was flirting with her, but in truth she didn't know anything about him beyond his service record. Maybe he was a consummate flirt before he'd been brought into her hospital. Maybe he was less comfortable sharing a bed with her than he let on, wrapping himself around her at night out of habit over desire.

Maybe that kiss had been exactly as impulsive as it seemed. Rather than a culmination of mutual feelings, it was letting off steam for him. He was a man, after all, and a virile one at that. It was human nature and she was available. More than available, she'd been doing her level best to throw herself at him since they arrived in 1998.

She set her spoon down as her stomach twisted with a new thought: here he was, doing his best to keep her safe, ripped away from a war for the future of the human race, and she was pouting because she just realized this was a one-sided crush. A pathetic one, at that.

"Maybe we should get a room with two beds." She brought her beer to her lips, finally tasting something. In this case, it was light lager with a pinch of salt and lime bobbing up and down in the remaining liquid.

All that intense focus snapped to her. "What? Why?"

Her eyebrows shot up. Not that she'd thought through the suggestion before it spilled out of her mouth, but given the distance he'd steadily put between them, she was surprised by the strength of his reaction.

"Well," she said, "I think maybe we should set clear boundaries. We're not in the tunnels anymore, there's not a need for us to sleep so close together. And-"

"Bones!" John shouted from the street. Sarah and Kyle flanked him. Sarah, at least, sported a sheepish smile.

Billy cursed under his breath, though why he should be angry, Abigail had no idea.

"What are they doing here?" she asked while waving. "And why did John call you 'Bones'?"

"Eh, I told him about the steel alloy thing and he fixated on it." He tossed up a wave of his own, smile tight, jaw clenched so hard a muscle in his cheek jumped. "It was that or 'Chip'."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Why don't you want them here? It's not like…"

The group entered the patio and pulled up chairs before Abigail could finish her thought. Any chance she might have had to speak her mind went out the door in a puff of smoke dancing a merengue on its way out.

* * *

Kyle’s eyes twinkled with mirth, flicking between Abigail and Billy.

“So,” he said slowly, “how’s it going?”

Billy kept his trap shut. There was no good way to answer that question. He’d really stepped in it. The trouble was, he didn’t have the first clue what else he could say or do. 

Entanglement with Abigail had already proven to be a dangerous distraction. He had a job to do, dammit. If he couldn’t be with his crew anymore, he could still stay on mission. Right now, his mission was simple: keep these people safe. See them through until Judgment Day. Fight until his last breath.

  
  


“I was actually just thinking I’d like to visit the local library.” Abigail pushed her soup around the bowl with her spoon.

With a snort, John leaned dangerously far back in his chair. “The library? Are you serious? Lady, the beach is right there.”

“They might have some medical journals I could check out,” Abigail said.

“You know you’re going to have to steal them, right?” John reached across the table to snatch a chip.

“Isn’t our medical knowledge a little outdated for you?” Sarah asked.

Abigail leaned across the table to slide the basket of chips closer to John and shrugged. “We do our training as apprentices, like doctors in the olden days. Not everyone has the same access to information. There’s always something new to learn. I will need help with the Spanish, though.”

  
  


A waiter approached to take drink orders from the new arrivals. As he left, Sarah toed John’s chair back to its proper position with her boot. “I think that sounds like a job for John.”

Instead of whining or rejecting the idea outright, John mulled it over, chewing slowly on a chip. “Sure, she can teach me some medicine stuff and I can teach her some Spanish. But can it wait until we get back? You said this was supposed to be a vacation.”

Sarah’s normally hard face softened into a look of motherly indulgence. “I think that sounds fair. Doc?”

“Perfect.” Abigail stood and slid her purse over her shoulder. Alarm bells rang in Billy’s head. “I’ll head out then. You know where we’re staying?”

“Yes and we have the cell phone.” Kyle patted the back pocket of his jeans. “Actually, I haven’t had anything new to read in a while. Mind if I join you? Bones, you stay here.”

Billy almost sprang to his feet at that suggestion. His entire body locked up in indecision. John was, or could be, important to the resistance in the future. Sarah was important. Kyle was important. They needed protection. But he couldn’t let Abigail out of his sight. He couldn’t. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her to wait, to suggest they all go together, when Kyle winked at him.

“Or,” Kyle said, “I could stay here with the family and you could go with her. Doc, I hear there’s a new John Grisham out. If they have it, mind grabbing a copy? Anything by him or Dean Koontz would be much appreciated.”

“And I’ll take anything Danielle Steel,” Sarah added, playfully shoving John in the shoulder when he grimaced. “Have I ever said a word about the weird shit you read online?”

“Every. Single. Time.” John punctuated each word by pointing his latest chip victim at her. “If they happen to have manga in a Guatemalan library, will you bring me some?”

Both Billy and Abigail frowned and cocked their heads, prompting a groan and eye roll from John. “They’re like Japanese comic books.”

“Japanese comic books, got it.” Billy rose from his seat and tossed a handful of bills on the table for their meals.

The one thing he didn’t want to think about was why trailing after Abigail soothed his ruffled feathers, knowing he was leaving arguably more tactically important people behind.

  
  



	8. 8

The walls of their hotel room pressed in on all sides. She wanted desperately to focus on the paperback she'd selected for herself—a tattered Spanish-language copy of _Jane Eyre_ —but her attention kept drifting to the man sitting on the couch pretending to watch TV.

She'd selected this book because she knew it almost verbatim; her own copy probably still sat atop her things at the hospital, if they hadn’t already been ratfucked by other survivors. It seemed like a good way to at least start learning to read and recognize Spanish words and grammar, all the better to help when she started in the small stack of journals she'd _checked out_.

It was a great idea except for one problem: her own personal woman in the attic. She almost laughed out loud at the thought. Billy was most certainly not what Charlotte Bronte had in mind when she'd written Bertha Mason. Nor did she think Billy was insane, though he was currently doing his absolute best trying to convince her he was. He was, however, utterly impossible to ignore and impossible to extricate from her life without killing him.

_Now, now, Abby girl_ , she thought, _then you'd just be giving him what he wants_.

She didn't want him extricated from her life. Their meeting might have been a trick of fate, but it wasn't a malicious conspiracy. When all was said and done, she was drawn to him and, if she wasn't terribly mistaken, he was to her. Why he now resisted that with all the strength nature and a team of highly skilled surgeons had endowed upon him was beyond her.

For all his stillness sitting on that faded loveseat, he rattled around in her brain, demanding the attention she'd just this afternoon sworn to not give him. It would be so much easier if she could.

Instead of attempting to re-read the first chapter again, she watched his profile over the top of the pages.

She'd misjudged him. She'd looked into those rich blue eyes, so close to death, she'd held his hand, and decided he wanted to be saved. She'd decided he wanted another chance at life as an augment because that's what she wanted to believe. He'd been bleeding out on the stretcher and she'd wanted so badly for the power to spare him. All that energy and hope and she'd poured it all into him, then made the mistake of believing that's who he really was.

Not many soldiers volunteered for the procedure because they wanted a second chance. They did it because they were believers. They believed down to their bones in the rightness of the human cause. They did it because it gave them one more chance to keep fighting.

All Billy wanted was to be in the fight and because she'd been there, because he wanted to protect her, he was out of the fight. Permanently.

Her heart stuttered and tears sprang to her eyes before she knew what hit her. In this small room, there was no way he'd miss it. She slipped off the bed and rushed to the bathroom, closing the door a little harder than she intended before the first strangled sob broke free.

"Abigail?" he called. Of course he wouldn't miss this. Oh no, not Billy, with his enhanced hearing and powers of observation.

She nearly tripped over her own feet throwing herself at the shower faucet and turning both knobs on full blast.

"I'm just taking a shower." Her voice came out choked.

"Are you all right? You sound like you're sick. I shouldn't have let you get all that shellfish. You can never trust it," he muttered.

That was it. Without bothering to check the mirror for the tell-tale signs of crying, she flung the door open.

"Let me? You shouldn't have _let me_ order the soup?" She knew her voice edged on shrill and she couldn't stop herself now that she'd started. The gates were open. "What is this? Am I a child you need to mind? Am I one of your soldiers? What are you doing?"

He winced, gritted his teeth, and shook his head in denial. "I can make sure you're safe. I have to-"

"I didn't ask you to be my bodyguard. I thought…no, it doesn't matter what I thought. I'm going to sleep on the couch tonight and tomorrow, I'll get my own room. I don't need a keeper and if that's the only reason you came, then I'd just as soon spend the next two weeks here on my own."

She closed the door in his face. Steam filled the bathroom and with it came the scent of the soap and shampoo they'd been sharing. What had felt like a small intimacy before now served as a reminder of her own idiocy.

"Don't do that, I'll sleep on the couch," he said through the door.

"Ugh," she groaned. "You're six-foot-five, you can barely sit on the bloody thing."

Silence. A battle won. At least she'd stopped crying.

"Abigail? I'm sorry." He sounded so genuinely contrite, she almost felt guilty for making him feel guilty. That couldn't be healthy. "I have to make sure you're safe."

What that man needed, she realized with a start, was a wake up call. There was not one single thing he could do to get himself back in the war and this sudden push to all mission, no play, wasn't any better than burying his head in the sand. Worse, it was spitting in the face of the universe's gift.

They had a chance to live, really live. He could beat himself into a bloody pulp over everyone else they knew not getting that chance, or he could grab onto it with both hands. If that didn't include her, so be it. At least she wouldn't have to stand aside and watch him waste everything.

As his doctor, she wrote him a new prescription: have a little fun, remember what they were fighting for.

She flung the door open and almost screamed. He stood right there. His nose had to have been touching it. Just standing there, waiting. Listening. Like an oak.

Like a machine. A flummoxed machine.

This had to change right now. She shut off the shower and he still hadn't moved. He watched her with a wary eye and again she felt a spike of pity for him. Poor thing had his entire world flipped upside down in a second.

"Right." She fisted her hands on her hips. "I want you to try a new exercise and we won't be starting slow."

He arched a brow and stepped back from the door. "Okay."

"What time is it?"

"'bout 7:30."

"Perfect." She slid by him and snatched the room service menu. "Plenty of time to order dinner. At 10, you and I are going out. I'll call Sarah and see if she and Kyle would like to join us."

He reached out and slowly pulled the laminated menu out of her hands, eyes narrowed. "Okay, but what is the exercise?"

"Fun," she said. "You need to learn how to have fun."

He scoffed and tossed the menu to the bed, folding his arms across his chest. "I know how to have fun."

She tapped a finger against her chin. "No, I don't think you do. You know how to blow off steam in short bursts. I don't believe you know how to sit back and actually enjoy anything."

"And you do?"

"I'm ready and willing to learn. I don't want to waste this. We've been given a gift. We get to actually live the lives we've fought so hard for. Do you think you can do that?"

Outside, someone on a scooter honked their horn. The ceiling fan whirred lazily on its highest setting, never managing to attain enough speed to produce a decent breeze. Billy shifted from foot to foot.

"It doesn't feel wrong to you?" He spoke barely above a whisper, like his words might travel through time and shame him.

"Almost everything feels wrong to me, Billy." She sat on the edge of the bed. She'd never said what she was about to say. She hadn't even really thought it before, not all together like this. "Our world felt all wrong to me. I always thought if I could live a normal life, I wouldn't feel so wrong anymore. But, now that we're here, it doesn't feel right, either. I feel guilty, too, you know. I don't know what the right answer is, but I do know that wasting this time could be the biggest mistake either of us make."

The bed sank with his weight. His heavy thigh brushed against hers. "What if you get hurt because I'm having too much fun?"

"What if I get hit by a bolt of lightning tomorrow?" She huffed a laugh. "What if I have an aneurysm and drop dead? What if an army of Rev-9's falls out of the sky? Trust me, I'm a doctor; even in our world, most people die from things an augment can't prevent. Besides, I did grow up in the apocalypse. I'm not entirely without a few survival skills."

He nodded slowly and something in the air released around them in a sigh.

"All right," he said. "Fun."

"No more guard dog."

He chuckled and squeezed her knee. Such a friendly, non-sexual gesture, it shouldn't have given her that little spark of need. It did.

"No more guard dog, but," he waved a finger at her, "I'm never going to stop looking out for you."

Such a friendly, non-romantic statement and her heart gave a traitorous flutter. Still, there were worse ways to live than side-by-side with a man who would never feel for her the way she felt for him.

  
  


* * *

  
  


"My spider senses are tingling," Sarah said.

She didn't own "going out" clothes. Neither did Kyle. They did, however, both own jeans and t-shirts, so that's what they wore.

Leaving John in the hotel room didn't sit right with her. Not that they'd never left him alone. Not that he wasn't trained to use just about any weapon with the skill of a lifelong soldier. At 14, he basically was a lifelong soldier.

There was something else. It niggled at the back of her brain, the part that hadn't evolved since a few very special apes learned to walk upright.

Kyle whistled a few bars of the Spider-Man cartoon theme. Thanks to John, they both knew more about the boy with arachnid gifts than either cared to. Admittedly, as far as cartoons went, it hadn't been a painful one to watch with him.

"Me too," he said. He brushed a hand along the back of his hips where he always kept a weapon. A .45 wouldn't do much to a machine, but they couldn't exactly walk around carrying large gauge shotguns. Besides, there were more dangers in this world than time traveling terminators. A pistol would do damage to them.

"Maybe we should head back to the camp."

A small boy with an open box of goodies ran up to them, chattering about the prices for gum and candy. Sarah did her level best to ignore his big brown eyes.

"Maybe we're both unsettled." Kyle tossed the kid a dollar and he scampered away with a wide grin. "The way I see it, if John isn't the leader anymore, there's a good chance we aren't a target anymore."

A pack of young American men stumbled out of a bar and into their path. Barely 10 p.m. and they were already wasted. Sarah wove through them, masterfully avoiding so much as brushing their clothes.

"C'mon, Reese. If this situation has shown us anything, it's that we have no idea what's coming."

He snaked a hand around her waist and tugged her close. "So it's 'Reese' tonight, huh? Look, in my experience, if a terminator wants to find us, it will."

"Yeah, but we have a lot more weapons back at camp." 

Like grenade launchers. And machine guns that fired rounds so big they could cut a car in half. And an army of trained fighters at their backs.

"True." He led them into an alley, away from the throngs and the music and lights. It had been a long time since the shadowy places had been imposing enough to keep her away. Sarah wasn't that girl anymore. There was almost nothing this dark alley could spit out that she couldn't face. With Kyle at her side? They were damn near unstoppable.

Instead of proceeding to the end, he turned to lean his back against the building wall and pulled her into his arms, between his legs.

"I kinda forgot," he brushed a lock of her hair behind her ear, "what happens to soldiers when they never get any breaks, because we've only been attacked twice."

She scoffed at his use of "only," as if either terminator had been a minor inconvenience. Though, she knew that to him, two attacks in 15 years was nothing.

"We've been attacked twice and we've never stopped training and living like it can come any time."

"It can come any time." That's what made it so scary.

"Yes, it can. And we'll always be ready. Sarah, you want a break, too. You're the reason we're here and I agree with you. John needed this. We're both just…out of our element and feeling weird."

Right. This was her idea. And it was a good idea. John had already perked up, taking a fresh interest in the world around him, beyond his new fascination with what made Hadrell _Hadrell_. Seeing the world, people who weren't preparing for or currently engaged in combat, was healthy. Normal. Positive.

Abigail's idea for this double date was a good idea. These were things people did. They were people, part of the world. They deserved a chance to live in it, too.

She softened into him. "What about trusting our instincts?"

"My instinct," he pressed his forehead into hers, "is to trust you. If you're feeling not right about this, we'll leave tomorrow. But let's have fun tonight. We'll hit the beach in the morning and if you're still feeling like this, we'll head home."

John would be so disappointed. She cringed inwardly, imagining the way his shoulders would stoop, the way his lips would press together and he'd nod once. She hoped he’d rage and yell and throw a fit.

In some ways, at some times, she preferred the yelling. His stoic acceptance had the power to break her heart.

Kyle tilted her chin up with his fingers and drew her in for a slow, lingering kiss. After all these years, they still lit each other on fire.

He nipped at her bottom lip, then pulled away before they did something probably illegal in public.

"I'll tell you this much," he said, "terminators don't lurk. If you feel like we're being watched or followed, we might be, but not by machines."

In their twisted, dark little world, he couldn't have said anything more comforting. She laughed against his lips and kissed him again. If he wondered what she found so funny, he didn't ask. Smart man.

  
  



	9. 9

"You want to dance?"

Ten minutes. They'd been inside the packed bar for ten minutes and already Abigail's dance card was full. Whatever the hell a dance card was. The phrase rattled around in Billy's overworked brain, some latent memory of a reference, something people said in a different time.

Someone jostled him to get closer to the bar. If the music hadn't been so loud, they might have heard him growl.

Fun. This was supposed to be fun.

How the hell was he supposed to have fun when she looked the way she did? Her dress was too tight and short, her hair too shiny, her smile too magnetic. Not that he blamed them, but the male species was a simple one and she was going to spend the entire night drawing them to her, a bright flame for all the moths. This meant he was going to spend the entire night grinding his teeth.

He didn't begin to have enough cash on him to buy the amount of alcohol it would take to get drunk. Jesus, could he even get drunk anymore? His metabolism probably processed liquor too quickly to get anything better than a short buzz.

Anything else had to be more fun than this. Trouble was, he was so rusty with the concept he couldn't think of anything else. The beach had been fun before he ruined it, but water, her bikini, and horseplay made a recipe for off-limits fun.

All right, maybe Abigail was onto something: he was in desperate need of fun lessons if his ideas were limited to puttering around after the woman and having sex with her.

Abigail looked at him with a question in her eyes and for a brief, brilliant moment he thought she might have had a total personality transplant and would ask his permission. 

She didn't. As quick as the question appeared, it vanished. She took the man's hand and let him lead her onto the crowded dance floor, shouting that she didn't know the steps.

"It's okay, I'll show you," the man shouted back with a wide grin.

Well, that was happening.

"How about some tequila?" Sarah looked up at him, her entire face pinched from holding back her smile. Even Kyle matched her expression. They were both in on a joke and he was the punchline.

Somewhere, in the ether of time and space, Derek Reese was laughing his ass off.

"Actually," Kyle produced a wad of cash and pushed it into the bartender's hand, "just leave the bottle."

Billy watched nonplussed as Sarah leaned across the battered wood bar, filled up a beer glass with lime wedges and stole a salt shaker, before laying out her ingredients next to three shot glasses.

"I had to teach Kyle how to do tequila shots," she offered.

"She saved me from a lifetime of suffering." Kyle said it so seriously Billy had to wonder how much of a difference lime and salt made to the consumption of alcohol. Never having had anything that wasn't brewed in an old barrel, he didn't have the first clue what tequila was supposed to taste like, or really any of the special liquors and beers and wines available everywhere they went.

"First, lick your wrist." Sarah demonstrated. Kyle followed suit and Billy wondered if they weren't having more fun at his expense, but he sighed and went along with it.

She sprinkled salt on the spot she licked and passed the shaker down the line. "Okay, get your lime ready. Lick the salt, shoot the shot, then suck the lime."

For a man whose drinking experience was so straightforward, tequila seemed like a choreographed dance. When Sarah grimaced, shivered through the lime, and made an exaggerated "Blech" noise after, Billy wasn't entirely sure the extra steps made it a worthwhile investment.

It did, however, have the benefit of keeping his mind off Abigail learning to salsa from an objectively good looking Guatemalan man.

The salt was salty. The tequila offered a smoother burn than any of the 'shine or Jake liquor with which he was familiar. The lime, however, brought all those flavors together in a decidedly unique twist.

He could have a few more of these. Fuck, he could probably drink the bottle before he started to feel it. Not that he would, or should. Kyle paid a pretty penny for it and the last thing he needed was to get drunk and make a bigger ass of himself than he had already.

It would be nice, though, to relax. To let his guard drop, even if only for a little while.

A quick glance at the dance floor showed Abigail still with the son of a bitch, er, man, now holding her closer than Billy liked. Correction: Billy wanted to be the one swaying with her.

Sarah cleared her throat. "You could cut in."

"No." He spat the denial out and poured himself another shot. Out of sheer curiosity, he slammed it back without the pomp and circumstance Sarah demonstrated. She was right. The salt and lime made it better.

She winked at Kyle and grabbed Billy's hand. "C'mon, I had to show Reese how to do this, too."

He didn't have to let her drag him onto the floor, surrounded by sweaty bodies and thumping music. He shouldn't have let her. It brought him much too close to Abigail and her dance partner.

She placed his hand just beneath her shoulder blades and took his other hand, a position that, now that he was back in, brought back a flood of memories of his one and only American high school dance. His mother had done this with him in their postage stamp sized living room. She'd pushed the coffee table out of the way and insisted he learn a few basics before the big dance, his American high school right of passage.

What had his date's name been? He couldn't remember. He couldn't even remember her face, except that he'd been thrilled when she accepted his invitation. He remembered camera flashes and worrying his sweaty palms would gross her out. He remembered selfies with faceless friends and when her hair got caught in his boutonniere.

"When Kyle and I first got to Mexico," she had to shout to be heard, "the militia insisted they throw us a party before John came along. Sort of a not-wedding reception, not-honeymoon, not-baby shower thing. Kyle didn't know how to dance, either, so I showed him."

Without conscious thought, he followed her firm lead, stepping in time to the music. Compared to the other couples swirling and grinding together, they were sedate. That was fine by him. Not only did he worry he might accidentally spin her into another dimension, the idea of grinding her hips into his had all the appeal of making out with his nonexistent sister. He briefly wondered if Abigail and Kyle weren't in the picture, would he feel differently?

No, he couldn't picture it. Not that she wasn't beautiful and supremely capable, he simply didn't begin to feel that spark of something else and didn't think she felt it, either.

She smiled encouragingly up at him. "I think you've got the basics down. Now, you better cut in with Abigail before-" she looked past him and winced, "Never mind. She took care of it herself. Go on."

With a gentle push, he turned and found Abigail stomping his direction with a grim set to her jaw. Behind her, her erstwhile dance partner was on his knees, cupping his balls. The immediate need to do violence against the person who put that look on her face warred with an innate male sympathy for a nutshot.

Abigail stopped in front of him. She tapped her foot and sucked her tongue against her teeth. Brassed off, hair mussed, just-kicked-a-guy-in-his-bollocks Abigail was hot.

"If you came out here to rescue poor little me, I already handled it."

His knee jerk reaction was to grab the man by the scruff of his neck, toss him into the street, then carry Abigail back to the hotel over his shoulder.

He wasn’t as smart as she was, but he also wasn’t a fool. If there was ever a moment for measuring his next words and actions carefully, this was it.

“I can see that.” He rubbed his chin. The scruff he found made him think he probably should have shaved. “Nicely done, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t having a few sympathy pains right now.”

That she didn’t scowl at him or make an attempt to leave him standing there alone told him he hadn’t stepped in it. He gave himself a mental pat on the back, which was probably premature seeing as he couldn’t make his mouth form the words he knew he should: would you like to dance with me?

Give him a fleet of Rev-7’s, a Dragonfly making a hard landing in hostile territory, a month of acid rain and low water rations, but ask a woman to dance and he apparently lost all nerve. Pathetic.

A higher being took pity on him and the band switched to something slow. Slow he could handle with slightly more grace than stumbling his way through the faster-paced dance Sarah showed him.

He held out his hand and waited, unsure what he would do if she rejected him, knowing he had earned it, knowing she should.

She held his gaze, reached out, and placed her hand in his. A dam he didn't realize he'd constructed broke inside him. As they stepped together, he surrendered to it and damn if it didn't feel good. He'd been holding onto the war with an iron fist, gripping it tighter and tighter, squeezing out the one person in this world he didn't want to live without. He would accept her friendship if that's all she wanted, but knew with sudden clarity he wanted more. If he let himself, he could have more.

They swayed together, incrementally drifting nearer until her head came to rest on his chest. He'd known it before, in brief flashes before stamping it down: this was right. This fit. She fit against him.

Despite the other people around, the driving need to be on the lookout for threats, the lifetime of experience telling him that if he let his guard down for even a second, people would die, contentment settled like a warm, soft blanket over his shoulders. It rested heavy enough to quiet everything else.

The song ended and the band shifted into another fast-paced number. Billy wasn't ready for that yet, but Abigail was already tugging him off the dance floor back to Kyle and Sarah's spot at the bar.

Billy surrendered to more than his long-brewing feelings for Abigail, he surrendered to all of it. For hours, the foursome danced and drank and shared jokes with strangers. They sang along to songs they recognized from the records back home. Records, as it turned out, could survive an apocalypse. Tapes and CDs, not so much. The digital music he’d grown up with had been wiped out first with the internet that defined their lives.

The music sounded so much better in a packed bar in Livingston, strummed out by a live band mixing Spanish and English throughout the lyrics.

Once they all let it happen, fun turned out to be easy.

  
  
  
  
  



	10. 10

The air was ripe and swollen with rain before the first drops fell. While others hustled and ran for cover, Abigail and Billy kept a leisurely pace down the sidewalk. Arm in arm they meandered back to their hotel, periodically pausing to turn their faces up to the sky and let the clean water wash over their skin.

When Abigail shivered, soaked to the skin, Billy wrapped an arm around her shoulder and picked up the pace. There might come a day when feeling him like this, when the fit of her soft curves against his tall, rock hard physique didn't make her pulse quicken. This was not that day.

At some point, the spell would break. Whatever magic had overtaken him in that bar couldn't last forever. This time tomorrow, he would be back to his guard dog self and she would be frustrated, stifled, and rejected. Again.

This was it, all she could expect. She'd enjoy this night and accept whatever he offered after, but damn if she spent her days pining after a man who didn't want her enough to set aside all the other baggage. If Kyle could profess his undying love to Sarah 24 hours after meeting, then, well, that just meant Billy wasn't there with her. Whatever flirting they'd had before was just that: flirting. A human response between people who might have sexual chemistry and nothing more. Two people with functioning hormones thrown together by circumstance.

Billy stepped in a puddle and, before Abigail had time to process how deep his foot sank, he tightened his grip and lifted her over the small lake in a single smooth motion. When her feet hit solid ground again, she looked back, pieced together what happened, and burst out laughing. All right, so some of the guard dog tendencies were sort of cute.

"What's so funny?" He asked it with a huge smile. Mirth is an infectious thing, even when the other parties have no idea why someone is laughing.

She threw her head back and laughed harder, catching raindrops on her tongue as she did so. Big hands traveled from her shoulders, down her back, to rest at her hips. Bigger thighs brushed against her own bared, soaked legs.

That put a stopper in her laughter. She didn't have to bring her chin down very far to look up at him, not this close.

When she didn't answer, he asked again. "What's so funny?"

His eyes roved across her face, lingering on her lips, drifting to her neck, to the cleavage this sundress displayed, before making a return journey back to her eyes.

"Nothing." Oh, good, she was doing that ridiculous breathy thing she saw on the telenovelas. Excellent.

"Tell me." He punctuated the order with a gentle squeeze of her hips.

Damn, but it was hard to think straight like this. She wasn't drunk, not by a long shot. 1998 booze might taste considerably better than the swill they grew up with, but 1998 booze couldn't even touch the alcohol content of the aforementioned swill. She had never been a big drinker. You couldn't be when you never knew when someone might need a doctor. But that didn't mean she had never indulged.

Between years of alcohol strong enough to power a large car and being able to eat carb and protein-rich meals to her heart's content for the first time she could remember, a few shots of Don Julio Blanco couldn't touch her.

The dizzy, floaty feeling had nothing to do with alcohol.

"You carried me over a puddle before I realized there was a puddle there."

"Why is that funny?"

This inquisition might have been borderline threatening, discomfiting, except for the look in his eyes. He looked at her the way a bigger, stronger, faster predator looks at its small prey once it's been cornered, heated with unrelenting desire. Like a tiny rabbit about to meet its maker, her heart beat faster, her skin tingled with the awareness that she was indeed caught. Unlike that tiny rabbit, she wanted to be consumed.

He dipped his head closer, so close rain water dripped off him down to her face, and repeated his question. Only, she had no idea what he was asking her anymore.

Before he moved in any closer, she remembered everything. The standoffishness. The refusal to look at her. The way he kept her close enough to supervise, but always out of reach.

She placed a hand on his chest and with only the slightest pressure, he stopped his descent. She wanted to live in the moment, she truly did. She wanted to take whatever he would give her. But faced with the reality now, she wasn’t sure her heart would survive it.

"What is this?"

He blinked and the corner of his lips quirked. "I was thinking about kissing you again."

"Then what?" In retrospect, she could have phrased that question a little better.

He leaned in, let his nose graze along her cheek, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the way the rain beat on the tin roofs around them.

"Then, I was thinking we go upstairs and fuck until you can't walk right anymore." He traced his nose along her cheekbone, so close his lips brushed the shell of her ear. "Does that qualify for your fun prescription?"

Oh, my. What was it she'd just been thinking about tomorrow? Was there any tomorrow that actually mattered? No, definitely not when tonight was standing right in front of her making filthy promises.

"Tell me you don't want this, Angel, and I'll never mention it again."

"Do you?" She had to ask it. He'd been too confusing, too unsteady. Flirting his fool head off with her in the PT gym on moment and keeping her an arm's distance the next. With his reach, that made quite the distance.

He chuckled low and warm, rich bourbon over ice. One hand cradled the back of her neck, fingers tunneling into her loose hair, while the other settled against her lower back and gave her a little push. Just enough there was no mistaking the evidence of his desire against her belly.

"For a while now, yeah," he said.

This man had the power to end her, literally and figuratively. For all that she pushed and pushed for him to dive in and embrace the joys of a life not at constant war, for all that she wanted it for herself, taking this step was walking off a pier in pitch darkness, no idea how far she'd fall or what awaited her at the bottom.

They knew better than most how quickly things could change, how bad they could get. Puttering around at the end of that pier meant standing still, never finding out how great the water felt, even if she drowned.

She jumped. "Let's go."

They practically ran up the stairs to their room, giggling like kids. It took Billy three tries to fit the key into the lock. Abigail, still giggling, had to dissuade him from kicking the door in.

"We won't be able to close it," she said.

Understanding broke through the haze of lust and purpose long enough for him to agree and try one last time.

Together they tumbled inside. One of them pushed the door closed, but Abigail couldn't say which. At last, his lips landed on hers.

This was not like the last time he kissed her. This was a claiming. He kissed like he wanted to devour her. God help her, she wanted it.

She pushed his sodden shirt up the rippling wall of his abdomen. He reached behind his head and yanked it off in a spray of cool rain water. It landed with a thunk somewhere in the tiny living room and he eased her backward, toward the bed, never breaking the contact of their lips.

The backs of her knees hit the mattress and she would have fallen, but he was right there keeping her stable.

He trailed his lips down her jaw, nibbling his way to the sensitive spot where her neck met her shoulders. Her heart raced, entirely out of sync with the way her body melted into a puddle of desire and sensation. She didn't know it was possible to be so spun up, so electrified, while still feeling like she was floating in a steamy bath, safe and warm.

Calloused fingers pushed the straps of her dress down until it pooled at her waist, baring her. She hadn't worn a bra with the revealing little sundress and she regretted nothing. 

He took a step back, disengaging for the first time. The cool air from the ceiling fan brought a chill to her heated skin, to the places still wet from his tongue.

He studied her in silence, so intent she forgot about the sudden loss of his warmth. When his eyes finally returned to her face, the look of pure intent had desire pooling low in her belly, between her thighs.

She'd seen all of him before. In the operating room. She'd seen him shirtless in PT. This was different. This beautiful man directed all that energy and focus on her. Before this night was over, she will have traced every hard line, every dip, every ridge with her fingers, maybe even her tongue.

"Look at you," he said. The longer he watched her, the more her skin tingled. "Take the rest of it off."

Was it possible to come from nothing more than being bossed around by a man who looked like that? Who made her feel this way? Just one instance wasn't enough to constitute a study. They'd have to try it a lot to establish enough data for a theory. For science.

Apparently, she didn't respond fast enough. His brows rose and he tipped his chin in the direction of her half-worn dress. She stepped out of her low heeled sandals and pushed the dress the rest of the way off her hips. It landed in a puddle at her feet and somehow that seemed more illicit than standing before him nothing but a lacy thong, the bizarre underwear her Wal-Mart friend had insisted was her only option. Something about letting the wet fabric lie on the floor, instead of ringing it out and putting it in a laundry bag, made this whole thing dirtier, more sexual.

"All of it, Abigail." His voice had an edge to it. He was a man used to command, to controlling his environment. Had anyone else used that tone on her, she would have balked. Coming from him, however, it only made her hotter.

She briefly considered mutiny on the grounds that he still had his jeans on, having lost his shoes somewhere between the door and bed. The low slung waistband highlighted the vee of muscle at his obliques. Her eyes were drawn inexorably to the hint of hair teasing out, the swell of flesh so very close to exposure. All she had to do was reach out and pop the top button…

"Now."

A _Yes, Sir_ almost flew out of her mouth. She held it back by a thread, unsure how he might take it, even more unsure why the thought of saying it made her wetter.

She hooked her fingertips in the fabric and pushed the panties down to join the dress.

His breath left him in a slow hiss, as if he couldn't hold it in anymore, as if he'd been holding his breath the entire time, waiting for this precise moment.

He traced a rough fingertip ever so lightly across her clavicle, down the outer swell of her breast, to the dip at her waist. "So beautiful," he murmured.

Both hands skated over her skin to cup her ass. When he squeezed, her sharp inhale brushed her nipples against his chest. A white hot bolt of sensation rocketed between her legs. Her knees went watery, but he kept her upright, chest rising and falling the way it did when he finished a run. Trembles danced through his skin, matching her own.

With a start, she realized he was as affected as she was. She had power over him. Little Abigail Ashe who spent untold years of her life hiding in shadows, forced to eat scraps even other survivors shunned, who survived by the grace of people stronger than her, had power here.

She dragged her hands up his torso, soaking in the study of contrasts she found: soft hair, smooth skin stretched tight over hard muscle. When her palms brushed the flat discs of his nipples, his skin jumped.

In another act of thoughtless, natural strength, he picked her up from his grip on the globes of her bottom and tossed her onto the bed. She landed with an ungraceful _oof_ and he stood over her, mouth turned up in a leonine smile.

He crawled into bed, muscles rippling with each movement. Good Lord, she was going to come out of her skin and his pants were still on. She reached for him again, but he caught her wrists in one hand and stretched her arms over her head.

"Billy…" She whined. She actually whined for him. None of her previous experience prepared her for this, this onslaught of deliberately slow, tantalizingly slow seduction.

He chuckled and took her mouth again, now leisurely, tongues stroking deep, moans caught up in the kiss. Inch by glorious inch he settled between her legs. The second his jean-clad erection made contact with her clitoris, her entire body arched up into his, seeking more.

He growled, the man actually growled into her mouth. One big hand gripped her thigh and tugged her leg up to wrap around his hip. She ground herself against him, chasing the near explosive feeling.

The kiss changed. It became hungrier, frenzied. His free hand slid up the back of her thigh until he dragged his palm, his fingers through the wet mess _he_ had made of her, of her…oh, she could barely even think it despite the way the word flashed like a neon sign in her brain…her _pussy_ felt right. Cunt was too negative, vulva and labia too medical. She didn't have to be a doctor right now.

She _shouldn't_ be a doctor right now. No, at this moment she was all woman and all his. Then one long, thick digit slipped inside and curled. When old romance novels described this moment as fireworks and stars, she'd assumed they were full of it. No, oh no, not full of anything.

Abigail saw stars and fireworks. It must have been obvious because Billy pulled back to watch her in unadulterated wonder while wave after wave washed over her.

As the waves ebbed, he said, "Jesus Christ, Angel."

She should feel embarrassed for orgasming that easily, with that intensity. She should be wondering why he kept calling her "Angel." Instead, she floated, but only for a moment. There was more to come and she wanted to chase that, too.

He released his grip on her wrists and, tragically, sidled off the bed. Not so tragic: he took off his pants, with a few muttered curses about wet denim. Before dropping the jeans, he fished something out of the pocket and slapped it onto the ancient nightstand beside the bed.

Then he flicked on the lamp.

On pure reflex, she squeaked and moved to cover herself with one hand while the other fought with the comforter to no avail.

"Stop." There it was again, that razor sharp edge, the command that had her stopping immediately. "I want to see you."

"You can see in the dark." She should know, she was there with the ophthalmologist who placed the specialty lenses in his eyes.

He shook his head. "No, not like that. I want to see you in the light."

A single light bulb should make her feel so nervous. She'd just come on his hand, for crying out loud. Modesty was off the table. But this was a first for her, as was doing any of this on a bed. Sex for her had been a perfunctory act, as simple and clear cut as periodically venting a steam valve. It was never really about orgasms for her because, being perfectly honest, most of those men had been more concerned with venting their own steam valve than seeing to her first. No, it had been about the driving need for human contact. Something, anything, to remind herself she was alive and a member of the human race.

What she and Billy were doing was so far outside her realm of experience, she felt like a virgin all over again.

He lost the boxer briefs. She'd never actually seen him fully nude. What she saw had been truncated swaths of skin, everything else covered in sheets, before cutting him open. 

The whole picture—conscious, flushed, painfully erect—was something else entirely.

It didn't seem possible that this warrior chose her. It made her want to cover up again. Surely, any second now, he was going to realize he could walk out that door and take his pick from any of the sexy, vivacious women of Guatemala. Or worse, he'd stay because he was kind and unselfish and wouldn't want to hurt her.

Something in his eyes softened as he returned to her side, peppering kisses around her face, her eyelids, lightly brushing her lips.

"That was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," he said. "Thank you."

His kisses trailed down her chest. His tongue circled her nipple before he closed his lips around the bud and sucked, then sucked harder when she moaned and pushed herself up, driving to get closer. He scraped his teeth against it and all thoughts about her general unworthiness vanished.

"So responsive." He shifted to the other breast to repeat the process. "All for me."

He said the words, but they weren't true, not on their own like that. He gave and gave and gave, taking his time, holding himself back when the tension throughout his body seemed stretched to its breaking point. _All for me_ , Abigail thought, was something quick and dirty, sometimes painful, always altogether less than what she needed. Everything he'd done since waking up from his final surgery had been all for her, hadn't it? Little things at first that grew in leaps and bounds. 

She loved him and, if she wasn't terribly mistaken, he loved her.

Hands skated across heated flesh. Their kissing resumed a fever pitch in a clash of teeth and tongues. He resumed his place between her legs without the barrier of clothing. Like a pair of dancers in a rehearsed routine, they rocked together. At the slippery contact, a tremor rippled down his entire body in waves.

He cursed and snatched the condom, tearing the package open with his teeth. She'd never been so entranced by the sight of a man rolling one on before. The lamp light highlighted and shadowed the play of muscle from his shoulders down his abdomen and Abigail had never been more glad of her study of human anatomy.

He braced one hand next to her head and the other gripped her hip. A fine sheen of sweat dotted his forehead and God damnit if he didn't hurry up…

"Now." She dragged her hands over his shoulders and lifted herself up kiss her way along his throat. The burn of his stubble might leave a mark and she couldn't have cared less.

After what felt like a lifetime, he slowly pushed into her with a string of curses and words of adoration. They stayed like that, panting while her body relaxed to accommodate him. Part of her wanted to stay just like this forever, reveling in the way he filled every inch of her, the way her flesh softened and swelled around him, blossoming at their intimate contact.

"You okay?" He took her mouth in a quick, hard kiss, shaking with the effort to hold himself back. "Fuck, you're so fucking tight. I don't…"

She cut him off with an experimental rock of her hips. No, this wasn't going to last long for either of them. She closed her eyes and let herself bathe in the feel of him filling her, his familiar smell, the musky scent of their lovemaking.

"Open your eyes." He released her hip to cup her face. She got to stare into those stormy blue eyes, meeting him thrust for thrust, faster, harder, increasingly frantic as together they built to a crescendo.

The first little spasms told her that her earlier orgasm had been nothing, a sparkler firework compared to what was coming next. His eyes flared, he must have felt it. His words turned to a litany of encouragement, begging her to _be a good girl and come for him_.

That did it. She went into a free fall, right over the edge as her body spasmed in wave after wave of pure pleasure. Billy followed with a shout. Feeling him pulsing inside her prolonged her own release.

Gradually, everything stilled. Her blood returned to her brain and their sweat cooled on her skin. The soothing drone of the ceiling fan, the comforting weight of him on top of her, the gentle pressure of him still inside her, all added up to what promised to be the best sleep of her life.

She moaned her displeasure when he slipped away, presumably to dispose of the condom. She couldn't keep her eyes open anymore, but she heard the bathroom faucet turn on, then off. The mattress dipped with his weight again and something warm and wet touched her thigh.

Her eyes fluttered open to watch him tenderly wash her clean. She almost opened her mouth to tell him to stop, to let her sleep in the evidence of what they just did, but he was so intent on his task, so very gentle with her.

He caught her looking and offered her a small, shy smile before negligently tossing the hand towel the same direction he'd thrown his shirt. Then he tugged the comforter down and settled himself at her back, the way they always slept.

He kissed her bare shoulder, took a deep breath, and they fell asleep the same way they had since coming to 1998, only everything was different.


	11. 11

Abigail couldn't remember having a better day. Truly, her memories of life before Judgment Day were almost nonexistent. She remembered facts and snippets, like blurred snapshots of someone else's life. Sometimes she struggled to differentiate between real memories and dreams.

She would remember today and last night forever.

Much to John's disgust, she and Billy couldn't stop touching each other. Every now and then, he shot her a look that said very clearly that he was thinking about how he woke her up this morning and she felt herself blushing to her roots.

They'd already spent several hours on the sand and now wandered toward a beach-front dive with no crowd. They could sit on the patio and enjoy cervezas and whatever delicious offerings the place had on the menu.

Billy kept a long arm slung around her waist. It was so easy. Every part of this day was so easy, like a weight had been lifted from all of them. Even Kyle laughed, rusty thing that it was.

Billy leaned down as they trudged through the sand and nuzzled against her ear. "Want to go back to the hotel?"

She giggled, making no attempt to worm away from him. Salt chafed under her jean shorts and beneath the ties of her bikini. Her shirt stuck to places where the gulf still wet her skin.

"No," she said, "they'll know."

He stifled a laugh of his own. "Angel, they already know."

"Fine. I'm hungry." She twirled out of his reach and jogged a few steps to catch up with Sarah and John.

Sarah raised an eyebrow, just barely over John's head.

"Don't say a word," Abigail said.

"Yes, please, not a word," John added as he lengthened his stride. Too bad for him, she and Sarah were women used to walking fast. Kyle drifted behind them to fall in step with Billy, sharing whatever secrets men shared when they didn't think anyone could hear them.

Sarah wore her standard green cargo pants and boots, even on the beach. It made Abigail glance down at her sandal-clad feet and consider, for a moment, that she wasn't remotely dressed for a fight. She chewed over the differences between them, wondering over what it must have been like for a young adult Sarah to be pitched into a future war, facing two major battles between stretches of false security.

For Abigail, 1998 marked a blessed reprieve. The war would pop up again or wouldn't. In her experience, there was only so much one could do when the machines appeared. She'd probably at least want closed toe shoes and full length pants, but this freedom was too sweet. Billy dressed similarly, while the entirety of the Connor-Reese clan thought dressing down just meant not wearing heavy jackets and being only lightly armed.

She wondered if, when this break from reality in Livingston was over, she and Billy would go back to dressing and arming themselves like every day could be the end of the world. She hoped not while understanding the necessity of it.

They could have a few more days, couldn't they?

The restaurant beach shack was playing something upbeat in Spanish over an AM radio.

Sarah fell into a seat and held out some money for John. "Grab me a soda, would ya, kid? Doc, you want anything?"

"I'll go order with John," she said. Perusing and ordering off a menu was a special experience Sarah and John couldn't possibly understand. All those choices printed on plastic-covered paper or written above a register. Almost anything a person could want written down in some kind of system, waiting for that person to make their choice.

Endless combinations and modifications made something as mundane as a menu a special treat as far as Abigail was concerned.

"What's horchata?"

John gasped like a vaudeville actor, hand slapped to his chest. “You haven’t had horchata yet? Dude, it’s cinnamon rice milk. It’s delicious. You’ll thank me.”

As she ordered an extra large horchata for herself, a dog barked in the distance. She tensed briefly, then shook it off. Another dog barked as she ordered a plate of tacos, closer this time.

She glanced over her shoulder. Sarah was smiling at something John said and Kyle and Billy stood in the bright sunshine, frowning and surveying the beach crowds. They were aware and that was enough for Abigail to let her guard slip a little further.

John stepped up to order, impressing the cashier with his fluent Spanish. A nearby dog erupted into furious barking and the hair on Abigail’s arms stood up.

Then the cashier’s eyes turned to saucers and people started screaming.

Time slowed down. She was distantly aware of restaurant patrons diving out of their chairs and Sarah launching herself up at the large man who walked in. Someone, Kyle maybe, yelled, “METAL!”

Then all Abigail could see was the business end of a shotgun, a gaping maw offering only death.

Time sped back up.

She shoved John out of the way. Had he smiled at it, even for a single beat? Why did he just stand there? He hit the floor and Abigail lunged for him. She had to get him out of here. Somehow, he was still a target.

The thing threw Sarah off and her back hit a table before she slumped down. Abigail struggled to get John back on his feet, but he was roughly as heavy as she was and frozen, a look of devastated confusion wrought on his young face. 

Any second and the air would rip open with a shotgun blast. Any second and she or John would be dead.

Her feet slipped on something slick. She hit her knees, closed her eyes, and waited for death.

The shot deafened her. Her ears flooded with a distant ringing and detritus rained down her right side. Then hands grabbed at her shoulders. A voice came, shouting as though under water, tugging and tugging on her to move. She opened her eyes and saw it was John shouting and urging her to her feet.

Gunpowder burned the air. She ventured a look over her shoulder and saw why the machine’s shot missed: Billy. They traded blows with unnatural speed before Billy caught its arm and twisted until he could hook his other arm around its throat from behind. He looked at her and shouted. She still couldn’t hear, but his mouth formed a single word: run.

John finally got her to her feet and they took off, sprinting through the sand, dodging people running in every direction. Some misguided souls ran toward the fight, unaware of the danger. When her feet hit asphalt, John tugged her one direction, but she needed to go the other.

Today, of all days, would be the day she didn’t bring a dose of Billy’s meds.

“C’mon,” John pulled on her again.

“I have to get to my hotel,” she said, starting that direction without waiting for him.

“We don’t have time to get your stuff.” He jogged to catch up with her. She couldn’t run very fast in these fucking sandals. “We have to get a car and get to the meeting place.”

Kyle and Sarah had chosen a fallback point just outside Livingston should the worst happen and they were separated.

She ducked through traffic, earning a few angry honks and shouts. “Billy’s going to need his meds if that fight doesn’t end quickly.”

The fight wouldn’t end quickly. Worse, she had to go back. Their fallback point was at least 30 minutes outside the city. If Billy couldn’t at least break away from the fight within the next few minutes, he might die before he got out of Livingston.

“You know how to hotwire a car?” She tossed the question over her shoulder as they took the stairs two at a time to her room.

“Yeah.” John ended his answer on an upswing in question.

They reached her door and Abigail realized her bag was still at the restaurant, right where she left it with Sarah. She had no key.

“Good,” she said. “Help me break down this door then go.”

“I,” he ushered her out of the way, “am not,” he kicked his foot just below the knob, “letting,” kick, “you,” kick, “go back there.”

The door gave way on his last kick. Abigail did not have time to discuss the merits of a 14 year old allowing her to do anything. She jammed her feet into the white sneakers she’d left conveniently by the door. The tongue of one of the shoes formed a lump on top of her foot that would be painful later, but she didn’t slow down to fix it.

She ripped open the dresser drawer so hard it almost came off its tracks and threw every bottle and premade syringe she found onto the bed. Everything went into a backpack, whether it was hers or Billy’s, she couldn’t say, while John danced on the balls of his feet.

"Let's go, let's go, let's go." He waved her closer then through the door, like the motion might make her move faster than she already was.

"I have to get back-"

"They're probably long gone," he cut her off.

That wasn't acceptable. If the fight moved, she had to find Billy. She estimated they'd been gone ten minutes. Ten minutes of full force, all out effort fighting would push his metabolism to its limits, but not drain him completely. Every time she'd pushed him in the gym, he'd been hooked up to a network of monitoring devices. Now all she had was her best guess.

They didn't make it far from the hotel before an SUV squealed to a halt in their path. Through the open passenger window, Sarah shouted, "Get in!"

She piled in after John. Billy wasn't there.

"Where is he?"

Kyle yanked the wheel around in a tight turn down a narrow alley.

"We're gonna circle back for him. Here," Sarah passed a handgun back to John, "that's the only spare we've got."

"A .45?" John took the weapon and pulled the slide back to chamber a round. "What the fuck is this going to do?"

Sarah muttered, "Better than nothing." She had an AK-47. Where she got that weapon was anyone's guess. 

"Somebody get in the back and get ready to pop the trunk."

Abigail tossed the backpack over the seat and crawled into the open trunk space. When Kyle veered around another tight corner, eliciting honks from other drivers, the momentum knocked her head into the driver's side window. She might pay for that later, but not yet.

All at once, they screeched to a halt and Billy was there, opening the rear glass while she popped the tailgate down. She made herself small and he rolled in, shouting, "Go, go, go!" before pulling the tailgate back up.

She didn't even bother looking to see if the machine was following, if it was right there, aiming its gun, preparing to end them. With a syringe in hand, she patted him down, feeling his temperature and pressing against his carotid for his pulse.

Everything was high, but he wasn't in danger yet. She slumped against the side of the trunk and let herself just look at him.

Sweaty, shirt torn, blood trickling down his face from a wound at his hairline. His knuckles were scraped raw, his lip and left eye were swelling. But he was whole. Nothing appeared broken. There was no excessive bleeding.

Breathing hard, he watched her, too, checking for himself that she was whole and safe.

"I pinned him to the street with a pipe," he said.

"That won't hold him long," Kyle said. They zipped through traffic, barely pausing at intersections, racing to get out of the city. Sarah had mentioned that they'd stowed a few bigger weapons at the fallback point in the jungle.

They had to get there.

"You gotta go for the head," Kyle said. "Their chip is where our temporal lobe is, a little right of center line. You can go for the heart, where its power cell is, but that's harder to penetrate and doesn't take it out of the fight permanently."

"Mom," John said.

"Right here." Abigail tapped on her head to show Billy.

He nodded and licked his lips. He needed water and they had nothing.

"Even if we blow it up," Sarah said, "you gotta get that chip out and destroy it. These things are-"

"Programmed to repair themselves, got it," Billy finished for her. Earlier Rev models were the same. "Weapons?"

"Mom," John said again.

"All we got is this AK and the .45 John's holding. If we can make it here," she held up a small GPS unit, "we've got more than enough to take that thing out."

"Pass it back." Billy reached across the backseat and took the unit. He flipped the casing off and pressed his fore and middle fingers against the circuit board.

"Mom!" John shouted. The car fell silent. "Was that…"

Sarah gritted her teeth and shook her head. "No, John, it wasn't him. This is a different one."

Whatever John thought of that, whatever they were talking about, he sat back in his seat and scowled out the window. Gradually, the buildings thinned out and they hit the highway. Luckily for them, all the local law enforcement was on its way to the scene of a shooting at a little restaurant on the beach.

"Everybody, give me your phones if you still have them," Billy said, holding out his hand. Only Kyle and Sarah had theirs, and they surrendered the devices without question.

He popped the rear glass again and tossed the phones and GPS out onto the highway.

"What the hell was that for?" John twisted around in his seat.

Billy grunted and tugged the glass back closed. "If I can track us with those things, then so can he."

Sarah looked to Kyle who nodded in agreement. "He's right. It can't do what Bones can, but if it gets access to a phone line, I mean, the damn thing's a computer, right?"

"So?" John's head swiveled between the driver's seat and trunk. "Those were burner phones. How would he even know the numbers?"

Billy sat back opposite to Abigail, his long legs folded. Blood matted his light hair. One of his toenails had torn off.

"Abigail, where is your phone?"

"It was in my bag."

"See?" Billy cocked his head at John. "All that thing has to do is pick up her bag, from the table where Sarah sat, pick up that phone, and the rest is history."

"This is ridiculous." John huffed. "Maybe it's not even after us. Maybe it's after them." He pointed an accusatory finger at Abigail and Billy.

"John," Sarah started.

"I'm serious! I'm not the savior anymore, so what does that thing even want with me? Maybe it was following them. Maybe we should ditch them."

"Easy!"

"Enough!"

Kyle and Sarah shouted at the same time.

Sarah waited a breath before continuing. "We're not splitting up. Do you hear me, John? I don't care if we aren't the target. We don't leave people behind."

John muttered something so low, only Billy could have heard it. His face betrayed nothing.

"What was that?" Sarah asked.

"I said he," John pointed at Billy again, "isn't even a person."

Abigail sucked in a harsh breath, ready, for the first time in her life, to strike a child. Billy just shook his head once and took her hand in his. After what he'd just put his hands through, it had to hurt, but he held on tight.

"Enough." Kyle's ice cold voice cut through the confines of the SUV.

"But-"

"I said lock it up!" For the first time since meeting him, Abigail saw Kyle's decades of soldiering. "You are going to sit there and not speak unless it is life or death, then when we're done, and believe me, we are going to put this fucker in the ground, you and I are going to have a long talk, because this shit? This shit isn't it, son."

They drove in silence the rest of the way.


	12. 12

It caught up with them when they were less than five miles to the fallback point.

Billy saw the convertible zipping between cars before anyone else.

"Sarah, pass that AK back." He didn't have to explain himself. The air inside the SUV instantly shifted into tense anticipation.

Everyone had seatbelts except him and Abigail. He would be all right in a wreck. She wouldn't.

The distance between the two cars closed quickly. Too quickly. Their vehicle was too old, too heavy. The machine had chosen something new and fast. They couldn't outrun it.

Billy popped the rear glass up and brought the stock into the pocket of his shoulder.

"Get in the back seat and buckle up," he said to Abigail without taking his eyes off the rapidly approaching terminator.

She was halfway over the seat when Kyle shouted, "Oh, shit!" and yanked the wheel hard to the left. She tumbled against John then fell back into the trunk as Kyle braked hard.

Stopped traffic filled their side of the highway.

"Get us out of here, Reese," Sarah practically growled. Her hands flexed in and out of fists, no doubt longing for the weapon she'd handed off to Billy.

"Hang on," Kyle said. He whipped the wheel hard left onto the shoulder. Smashed between cars and a cement divider, he pushed the SUV to its limits, grinding against cars unfortunate enough to be too far to the left. They lost both side view mirrors.

The terminator's car was smaller. Billy didn't wait for it to get any closer. He aimed his weapon at the engine block and started squeezing off rounds. A satisfying trail of steam, then smoke appeared from the hood and the car slowed down, becoming smaller and smaller in the distance.

It jumped out and sprinted after them. They couldn't go faster than around 35 miles per hour as they continued to bounce between cars and the barrier. The side window over Abigail's head burst in a shower of safety glass.

Car horns blared their outrage at each swipe. Billy looked ahead through the windshield just in time to see a pickup truck swerve onto the shoulder. He didn't need his HUD to calculate that they didn't have time to stop.

Sarah and Kyle cursed as one. Billy threw his body over Abigail and an arm across John's narrow shoulders. 35 miles per hour into the back of a stopped pickup truck packed a punch. Even braking hard, they slammed into the tailgate in a crush of screaming metal and shattering glass.

Everyone was dazed except Billy. People streamed out of nearby vehicles. Some looked ready to get their pitchforks, others simply looked concerned, ready to help. They were too compressed to get out their doors, leaving the windshield and their own tailgate as the only exits. The terminator ate up the distance between them with measured, inexhaustible strides.

  
  


Of the other four, Abigail recovered the quickest. He'd kept her from being rocked too hard by the impact, kept her neck stable.

"We have to move." He raised his voice, hoping it would jar Sarah and Kyle out of their stupor. "John." He shook the boy a little, not wanting to hurt him, but desperately needing him awake and in motion.

"Take him and run," Sarah said in a voice like sandpaper on gravel. Her nose was busted and bleeding and one of her fingers was bent at an unnatural angle. "I'm stuck."

Abigail wiggled out from beneath him, snagged her backpack, and pushed the tailgate down. The only indication she gave of her fear was a low, fast hiss of breath only he heard.

"I'm not leaving you." John didn't unbuckle his seatbelt.

"Go," Kyle croaked. With the steering wheel in his lap, he had to be pinned down, too. "It doesn't want us, don't worry about us."

None of the people crowding around the car seemed to notice the blood covered machine thundering their way. Abigail tried her level best to encourage them to run, but they seemed to universally agree she was hysterical.

Sarah locked eyes with Billy, a little wild, a snarl curling her lip. "Grab him and run."

He nodded and took on the responsibility without question. He reached for the buckle, but John anticipated him and covered it with his hands. They were still small and narrow with youth, so Billy easily encircled them with one of his over-large paws and pried him away before yanking him up and over the backseat.

John screamed and howled his fury, beating uselessly on Billy's arm and shoulder. He scored a hit to Billy's ear that probably hurt him more than it hurt Billy. Once out of the vehicle, Billy ignored the angry shouts—as a large man, he was surely responsible in some way for their trail of destruction—and threw John over his shoulder rather than drag him. He grabbed the AK-47 and without needing to be signaled, Abigail fell into step behind him, stretching her shorter legs as best she could to keep up.

Braver drivers tried to stop their flight, but something about a 6'5" wall of muscle barreling down on them with a large rifle took all their fight. Once clear of the traffic, he dropped John to his feet. As predicted, the machine changed course, stomping over cars and inciting fresh outrage from all around. Unlike Billy, it didn't hesitate to throw people out of its way.

"You guys run, I'll take care of it."

Both started to argue as one, but Billy slapped Abigail's hand into John's, followed by the AK in his other hand, and directed his next words to the young man. "Listen, you have to take care of her. You know how to navigate through this shit, right? Get her out of here. Let me worry about the machine."

Just like it worked on soldiers, this trick worked on John. In an instant, he shook off his tearful fury, straightened his shoulders, nodded, and urged Abigail to follow him into the dense jungle.

She dragged her feet, shaking her head. There were so many things he wanted to say and no time to say them. How could someone he'd known for such a short time have come to mean so much to him?

All he could do was hope she knew, hope his eyes and his face spoke for everything else, and say, "Go."

She closed her eyes, swallowed, and finally allowed John to lead her away. Once they were gone, Billy turned to face his fate. It was 50 yards away and closing fast, still armed with that damn shotgun and a bandolier of rounds.

Now people ran. Some stayed in their cars. Billy wished he could tell them all to run, but he didn't have time for that, either. He did, however, have time to snag a length of square, steel tubing off the back of a flatbed truck laden with construction supplies.

Here's what he'd learned in his brief confrontation with the thing on the beach: it was stronger than he was, more durable, and appeared to possess infinite stamina. He was faster and more agile.

The terminator had at least 40 rounds left. The math he couldn't predict was exactly how quickly he could get it to waste those rounds before his own system overloaded. No, he had to try something else.

It didn't even break its stride when it brought the shotgun to its hip and started firing, but Billy saw this coming and had already started his dive behind the engine block of the truck he'd just robbed.

He reached up, gripped the door through its open window, and snatched it off the frame. He sprung from the balls of his feet and tossed it like an oversized, off-balance frisbee at the machine with an accuracy that surprised even him.

He didn't slow his sprint. The door was just enough to throw it off balance atop its perch on the hood of a car. While the machine was still turned to let the door skim the side of its head, Billy launched onto the hood of the nearest car and swung the pipe at its head with everything he had. The crack of impact reverberated up his arms.

There was no letting up. No room for a breath. He swung again, this time for the arm still clutching the shotgun. Its grip didn't loosen. It came back around with a solid left hook to Billy's face, but Billy was faster. He took the glancing blow on the chin.

He brought the pipe back up to the terminator's jaw, shoving its head back. At the same time, he kicked his calf into the back of its knee. The combined action brought it down, crushing the hood further.

This was a mistake, as a machine lacks lungs from which to knock out air. It raised the shotgun and fired. The round cut a deep furrow in his waist and the momentum sent him sprawling backward to the highway.

He had the oxygen that left his body in a great, heart-stopping lurch. The machine's heavy steps revealed its approach. Billy kicked out a leg and swept the barrel of the shotgun to the side before it fired again, aimed this time for his head. The asphalt next to him exploded. To his surprise, the shotgun clattered to the ground.

The machine reached for him. He caught its fists and what he didn't want to happen happened: they locked into a contest of strength Billy couldn't win.

The wound at his waist screamed. Sweat slicked his palms. Gritting his teeth, he realized he might have a tooth loose. He put everything he had into his arms while his brain ran through ways out of this situation.

Nothing came to mind. The second he weakened, the machine would have even more of an advantage. On the other hand, it might create an opening.

He shifted his grip to its wrists and jammed his elbows in, breaking its locked out arms. Its weight crushed his chest, but he didn't stop, he refused to let it up. He held it there until he got his legs up. Up up and around its neck. With all his core strength, he lifted his hips until the terminator was forced backward. Now it was down to one terminator arm versus every muscle in Billy's body.

His heart thundered erratically and sweat stung his eyes. Still, he refused to let up, pushing and pushing. The terminator used its now free arm to beat against his leg. When that proved useless, it raked his skin from thigh to calf with its fingers. Billy unleashed a howl and pushed and pushed until he heard what he was looking for: a slow popping, tearing sound from the shoulder joint he had contorted well beyond human limits.

Just a little more, he just needed a little more. His HUD flashed warnings at him. His heart rate became more erratic and his vision blurred. Sound faded in a haze.

The machine's arm tore free and sparks rained down on him. If they burned him, he was beyond feeling the sting. Maybe this would be enough. Maybe, down to one arm, the others stood a better chance. Maybe John and Abigail were long gone and Sarah and Kyle were, at this very moment, free and running into the fray. He hoped not. No sense in them dying for his sake.

God knew he wasn't going to make it. This was the end of the road for him, the end of his fight. Instead of feeling at peace with it, like he thought he would, like he had that first time those scant months ago, he felt rage. No, rage wasn't right. It was grief. It pierced through him, burning white hot.

He had wasted so much time keeping Abigail at a distance. Flirting then pulling away, too afraid of what he might lose to hold it in the first place. Had he really thought this kind of death would give him satisfaction? What an idiot he'd been. What he would give to re-do that time.

A meaty fist grabbed his throat and lifted him off the ground. He kept his grip on the dismembered arm and swung wildly at the terminator with it.

He choked out a laugh. Derek "I'll rip your arms off and beat your ass to death with them" Reese would love this. If there was an afterlife, that conversation was at least something to look forward to. Damn, he was delirious.

It threw him into the side of a van so hard, his back split the metal sliding door. He staggered to his feet, gripping the arm like a bat, ready to at least go out in a way that would make Derek proud of him, even if his senses were going haywire.

Gunfire erupted. The terminator stopped its advance to focus on the source of the gunfire, cocking its head. 

Whatever threat Billy had once held, whatever interest the machine had in him, no longer concerned it.

It marched in the direction of the shots, its clothing periodically shredding. Rounds pinged off its head, big enough to tear through its synthetic flesh, but not big enough to more than dent the endoskeleton. A round penetrated its eye and it stumbled.

Then Abigail was there, like a dream. His angel. His valkyrie.

"Wha-"

She jammed a very large needle into the meat of his ass, all the while watching him with those big dark eyes. She was at once pale and flushed. Her sable hair was matted around her face and neck. She was so beautiful.

The fog around his brain cleared. His heart, beat by beat, slowed and resumed a steady pace. He realized he was leaning on her so heavily she had to brace her feet wide apart. Her knees shook with the effort it took to keep him upright.

He straightened. He wanted to shake her. He had told her to run, god damnit, yet here she was. Saving his life. That meant…

"Fuck." He whipped his attention back to the problem at hand. The terminator was almost on top of John and John was almost out of bullets.

Brave, stupid, selfless kid. It was a wonder that in any timeline he lived long enough to become the leader of the resistance.

The square pipe was nearby. He snatched it up, braced one end against the asphalt, and stomped on it. The end broke off and the new edge was nice and sharp. Just what he wanted.

"Get back," he barked over his shoulder. He could apologize for being short with her later.

He hauled the pipe back and threw it like a javelin, like a warrior in ancient history, fighting with sharpened sticks. It landed square in the thing's spine, ending its advance on John. It reached uselessly behind itself as Billy ran full speed into it, throwing his whole body into the impact.

He imagined this is what it felt like to be hit by a car. His loose tooth incited agony in his jaw and for just a second, he thought he saw little yellow birds circling in his periphery.

On the ground, the machine couldn't move its legs. At least it shared that particular human trait. He twisted the pipe, wiggled it back and forth, further severing its connections with its lower body, before he pulled the pipe back out.

It reached its remaining arm at his feet. Billy crushed his heel onto its fingers and ground it down. When he lifted his foot, the hand was missing a few fingers.

Without further ado, he rammed the pipe into its head, from the left side all the way through the right, spearing it to the ground.

It stopped moving.

John lowered his weapon and threw his head back to gulp in air. Abigail approached on cautious steps. She squeaked in surprise when he whirled on her, took her in his arms and planted a long, wet kiss on her mouth.

John groaned.

"How many times are you gonna keep saving my life, Angel?"

She pressed her lips into a thin line. "As many times as it takes."

"Good."

Her eyes lit with surprise. That scolding cut of her mouth turned into a little smile.

"Mom! Dad!" John took off running.

Sarah and Kyle picked their way through the abandoned cars. They held each other up as they both limped and Sarah clutched her damaged hand to her chest.

That didn't stop John from practically tackling them with a wide hug. Sarah got her hand out of the way just in the nick of time. Kyle ruffled his hair and as one, they all took a collective deep breath.

"Looks like we missed all the fun," Sarah said over John's head, which only resulted in him practically exploding with the whole story in a rapid fire monologue about the _badassery_ he witnessed.

Billy laughed and hugged Abigail into his chest, heedless of the still bleeding wound at his side.

That could be fixed. His tooth and everything else could be fixed. Some things he could fix himself.

He pulled back and took her face between his hands. "I don't want to die."

A tear escaped her eye, so he brushed it away with his thumb. "Took you long enough."

"I'm an idiot."

"Yes," she nodded gravely, "you are."

"I'm an idiot who loves you, though."

She graced him with a brilliant, shining smile. A fear he didn't know he'd harbored vaporized when she said, "I love you, too, you idiot."

Standing over the corpse of a terminator, he kissed her again.


	13. Epilogue

They returned to the terminator, buried in the jungle, a week later and torched it with thermite. Their little family stood off to the side and watched that fucker burn. If the smoke hadn't been toxic, Sarah would have brought marshmallows.

And they were a family, she thought as she took in the group. For so long, it had been just her, Kyle, and John. Now they had Hadrell and Abigail, who looked halfway to starting a family of their own, the way they couldn't keep their hands off each other. Abigail confessed one night, sitting around a bonfire opposite the boys, that as much as it appealed to her, the idea of bringing a child into the world knowing what was to come scared her more than the apocalypse itself.

If they had their way, and they probably would, they'd be expanding the family to include the new leader of the resistance and a fellow soldier they both expected to drop through time in the next twenty years. She and Kyle would be long gray by then, John a grown man.

Settling into a new routine in the jungle was easier than ever. Something happened on that highway with John. He grew up. She regretted it, but she also appreciated it. He was going to be better than okay. John was going to be a great man.

He and Kyle still got to play baseball with the rebel soldiers, if not always with kids his own age. Hadrell politely declined to join, preferring to spend his time following the doc around like a very large, very deadly puppy. Once the immediate threat had lifted, Kyle had been much the same, revelling in his newfound freedom to simply enjoy things, to be the young man in love. Hadrell would mellow with time. For now, she got to enjoy the show.

Every day the whole clan ate lunch together in their bigger house, two rooms with an open kitchen, dining, living area. In their corner of the jungle on a rebel militia base, it was downright decadent. It had solid planks floors and indoor plumbing. Sarah and Abigail cooked and, despite the antiquated nature of it, neither of them minded. The simple domesticity of it all had its own special appeal.

“What about Tom Hanks?” Hadrell asked one particular afternoon.

Kyle and Sarah both looked up from their lunch. After discussing the potential risks and benefits of stopping 9/11, bringing up Tom Hanks threw them both for a loop.

“Right,” Abigail said. “I remember my dad telling me about that. That could be more doable. Certainly less risky with how it might affect the financial sector.”

“Wait, what about Tom Hanks?” John turned away from his computer for the first time all afternoon.

“I could kill Tom Hanks.” Hadrell made this declaration as flatly as if he’d suggested changing the oil in their vehicles.

Sarah set her fork down. “Why are we discussing killing Tom Hanks?”

Abigail shuddered. “You probably don’t want to know.”

“It was ugly.” Hadrell nodded gravely. “All those poor people.”

The room went so quiet, Sarah heard the ticking of Kyle’s watch. She turned to Kyle. “Do you know what they’re talking about?”

“Nope.” He kept on steadily chewing his food. “But I’m interested in seeing where this goes.”

That’s when John lost it, bursting into uproarious laughter. “I love this guy! He’s gonna kill Forrest Gump!”

“And that’s just one extremely good reason to do it, trust me,” Hadrell said.

Sarah pushed back from the table and collected her plate. “Guys, can we shelve murdering a popular actor for later? Like, maybe, never?”

Children. She was surrounded by children.

And she wouldn't have it any other way.


End file.
